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Back Issues #703 - 705/ 710 - 713
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News * Analysis * Research * Action
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- AFIB No. 734, June 28, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
All intelligence operations in the political sphere outrun their asserted purposes. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of military intelligence. The formal justifications--preparations for emergency troop call-outs and the monitoring of threats to the military function itself--serve as little more than pretexts. The scope and intensity of the field operations of the Army's intelligence personnel established all too clearly that, as in the case of the Bureau's surveillance system, they were at root forms of aggression against legitimate political expression. -- Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's Political Intelligence System [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980] pp. 304-305.
Contents: Number 734
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 736/July 5, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 735/July 2, 2006
Back Issues #703 - 705/ #710 - 713
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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Web: http://www.wsws.org/
E-Mail: editor@wsws.org
- Wednesday, 28 June 2006 -
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1. BUSH, CHENEY THREATEN NEW YORK TIMES
OVER EXPOSURE OF SURVEILLANCE PROGRAMS
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/time-j28.shtml
By Patrick Martin
In a brazen effort to intimidate the media and halt any further exposures of illegal US government spying, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and several Republican congressional leaders have denounced the New York Times and suggested that the newspaper could face criminal charges for its report on US government surveillance of international financial transactions.
The Times reported June 21 on its web site and then in its June 22 print edition that the Department of the Treasury had secretly accumulated an enormous database on international financial transactions by obtaining access to the records of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, a Belgium-based clearinghouse for major banks and other financial institutions. Similar reports were published by the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal June 22, and then more generally throughout the US media.
Bush used a pro-war photo-op at the White House Monday to attack the media reports, saying, "the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America."
Cheney singled out the New York Times by name. "Some of the press, in particular the New York Times, have made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult by insisting on publishing detailed information about vital national security programs," he told a Republican fundraising luncheon in Nebraska.
Connecting the latest exposure to previous revelations about massive domestic wiretapping and data mining by the National Security Agency (NSA), Cheney added, "What is doubly disturbing for me is that not only have they gone forward with these stories, but they've been rewarded for it, for example, in the case of the terrorist surveillance program, by being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for outstanding journalism. I think that is a disgrace."
White House press secretary Tony Snow denied the obvious truth that the comments by Bush and Cheney were intended to intimidate critics and silence the media. "It's not designed to have a chilling effect," he said. "But the New York Times and other news organizations ought to think long and hard about whether a public's right to know, in some cases, might overwrite somebody's right to live."
The claim that these illegal spying operations, which target millions of ordinary people in the US and around the world, are driven by the imperative of defending the American people from terrorist attack is a lie. Like the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Department and the assertion of unchecked presidential powers, these programs are directed against the democratic rights of the people. Those who have implemented them know full well that the greatest potential threat to the American corporate elite which they serve comes from among the American working population, not bands of Islamic terrorists.
The accumulation of information on international financial transactions is simply one more element in the Bush administration's creation of a massive, centralized database on the American people, an indispensable part in the preparations for widespread domestic repression against those opposed to the war in Iraq and the government's right-wing social policies.
There is not the slightest indication that any terrorist attack has been exposed, disrupted or even delayed as a result of the surveillance of banking transactions. Nor has there been any reporting on some of the more curious financial operations that preceded the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. These include the alleged transfer of $100,000 from intelligence operatives of Pakistan--now the Bush administration's close ally--to presumed suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta, and the widely reported dumping of stock in United Airlines and American Airlines in the days leading up to 9/11.
The barrage against the Times is a calculated maneuver by the White House that bears the imprint of Bush's chief political hatchet-man, Karl Rove. His modus operandi is, whenever the administration is caught in a crime, to escalate the provocation and smear critics as apologists and even allies of terrorism.
While neither Bush nor Cheney explicitly called for prosecution of the Times, this demand was raised by Congressman Peter King (Republican of New York), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, who began the orchestrated series of attacks on the Times.
Like Bush and Cheney, King described the publication of the report as "disgraceful." But he went further, declaring, "We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous." He said he would urge Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to "begin an investigation and prosecution of the New York Times--the reporters, the editors and the publisher."
In a McCarthy-style diatribe delivered on Fox News, King added, "Nobody elected the New York Times to do anything. And the New York Times is putting its own arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda before the interests of the American people." He made it clear that the venom directed at the Times was as much for its exposure of the NSA spying as for the most recent report on surveillance of banking transactions. "The Times is more of a recidivist," he said, using a term usually reserved for repeat criminals.
On Monday, King actually sent a letter to Gonzales seeking an investigation into whether the publication of the report on banking surveillance violated the Espionage Act.
As with its political offensive in support of the disastrous and deeply unpopular war in Iraq, the White House clearly banks on the complicity of the Democrats and the cowardice of the media to allow it to brazen out a defense of its illegal spying.
In contrast to the revelations of systematic monitoring of international and domestic telephone calls, in defiance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, there has been little or no congressional criticism of the surveillance of bank transfers, which was also conducted without obtaining warrants from any court and without legislative approval.
While Bush claimed, "Congress was briefed, and what we did was fully authorized under the law," it seems that only the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, a Republican, and one or two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were notified. Congresswoman Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said she received her first briefing on the program only recently, after the White House learned that the New York Times was preparing to publish a report on the subject. "They knew it was going to leak," she said, adding that the program should have had greater oversight.
Significantly, in keeping with the cowardly and complicit role of the Democrats, she said nothing publicly about the financial surveillance operation when she was briefed, and refuses to criticize the program itself.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, the top Senate Democrat, said the banking surveillance program "doesn't seem to be based on the same shaky legal analysis" as the NSA spying. Like Harman, he criticized not the spying itself, but the decision of the administration "to ignore its duty to keep Congress informed."
Senator Charles Schumer of New York issued a statement essentially supporting the program, saying, "Allowing law enforcement to examine bank records in order to stop the flow of money to terrorists makes a lot of sense, and this program appears to allow for just that."
Another senior Senate Democrat, Joseph Biden of Delaware, said he would have preferred that the Times not expose the operation, although he did not support any effort to penalize the newspaper for its actions.
Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times wrote defensively about their decision to publish, in terms that revealed how both newspapers were placed under government pressure to pull back from any reporting on the assault on democratic rights.
In a letter posted on the New York Times web site Sunday, Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote, "Most Americans seem to support extraordinary measures in defense against this extraordinary threat" of terrorism, but he added there were concerns "over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight." Keller noted that those who wrote the US Constitution "rejected the idea that it is wise, or patriotic, to always take the President at his word, or to surrender to the government important decisions about what to publish."
Los Angeles Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet commented, "History has taught us that the government is not always being honest when it cites secrecy as a reason not to publish. No one believes, in retrospect, that there was any true reason to withhold the Pentagon Papers, although the government fought vigorously to keep them from being published..."
Meanwhile, a further revelation of government spying appeared in Newsweek on the weekend. The magazine reported that the Treasury Department had used a largely unpublicized provision of the USA Patriot Act to obtain over 28,000 financial records, "including thousands of bank accounts, wire transfers and other transactions involving individuals, companies and nonprofit organizations inside the United States." While nearly 4,400 individuals were targeted for this financial snooping, the results from a law enforcement perspective were meager: 90 indictments, 79 arrests, and 10 convictions, none of them apparently for terrorism.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
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2. 'BIG BROTHER' BUSH AND CONNECTING THE DATA DOTS
The Total Information Awareness program was killed in 2003,
but its spawn present bigger threats to privacy
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LOS ANGELES TIMES
Opinion
June 24, 2006
By Jonathan Turley
THE DISCLOSURE this week of a secret databank operation tracking international financial transactions has caused renewed concerns about civil liberties in the United States. But this program is just the latest in a series of secret surveillance programs, databanks and domestic operations justified as part of the war on terror.
Disclosed individually over the course of the last year, they have become almost routine. Yet, when considered collectively, they present a far more troubling picture, and one that should be vaguely familiar.
Civil liberty-minded citizens may recall the president's plan to create the Total Information Awareness program, a massive databank with the ability to follow citizens in real time by their check-card purchases, bank transactions, medical bills and other electronic means. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, was assigned this task, but after its work was made public, Congress put a stop to it in September 2003 as a danger to privacy and civil liberties.
However, when Congress disbanded the Total Information Awareness program, it did not prohibit further research on such databanks, or even the use of individual databanks.
And, according to a recent study by the National Journal, the Bush administration used that loophole to break the program into smaller parts, transferring some parts to the National Security Agency, classifying the work and renaming parts of it as the Research Development and Experimental Collaboration program.
It was long suspected that Total Information Awareness survived, and the disclosure this week of another massive databank operation has only reinforced that fear. The spawn of DARPA seem to be turning up in secret programs spread throughout agencies.
The administration learned that it could not create a network of databanks in one comprehensive system, but it could achieve the same results by creating smaller systems that could be easily daisy-chained at a later date into the same kind of massive computer bank that Congress thought it had shut down. It is DARPA, albeit with assembly required for the ultimate user.
Consider some of the recent disclosures:
* A domestic surveillance program operated without warrants involving thousands of calls that are isolated by computers at the NSA.
* A massive databank that contains information on hundreds of millions of telephone calls of Americans that is described as the world's largest database.
* Access to information in a massive databank that carries 12.7 million messages each day on international financial transactions.
* Use of massive private databanks with access to an array of information on citizens, including at least 199 data-mining projects.
* Quiet support for a national registered-traveler program in which citizens voluntarily submit private information and subject themselves to background checks for faster passage through airport security. (The information would then be housed in a computer system accessible to the government.)
These computer databanks and programs are technically separate but collectively could exceed the dimensions of the DARPA program killed in 2003. Most of these systems have certain common characteristics, including the absence of congressional approval. Indeed, the recently disclosed financial transaction program was created by the Bush administration as an emergency program, but it has continued for years.
Although the administration has refused to involve the courts in such programs, it actually contracted out the role of oversight -- according to the New York Times, it hired a private auditing firm to make sure that the monitoring of financial transactions was not being misused. Such outsourcing of civil liberty protections is hardly what the framers foresaw when they created a system of checks and balances.
MOST OF these programs are designed to look for suspicious conduct from everyday transactions. By combining information, the government uses "link analysis" to find something suspicious among otherwise innocent-looking transactions. It also is a technique that necessarily exposes innocent citizens to constant forms of surveillance or monitoring -- the very danger of DARPA's Total Information Awareness program that Congress wanted to avoid.
It now appears that the administration has achieved by stealth what it could not achieve by persuasion in Congress: the creation of a computer network that could follow millions of citizens to reveal their movements and transactions.
It is all part of this administration's insatiable desire for information. With regard to its own conduct and information, the administration has fought against the notion of transparency -- from refusing to disclose meetings with lobbyists, to denying Congress information needed for oversight, to threatening journalists with prosecution for revealing secret programs such as the NSA domestic surveillance program.
Yet, when it comes to citizens, the administration demands total transparency to allow it to monitor everyday transactions and conduct.
It is perhaps the greatest danger that can face a free society: a government cloaked in secrecy with total information on its citizens.
For most of our history, one of the greatest protections for civil liberties has been the practical inability of the government to surveil a large number of citizens at one time. In the last couple of decades, those technological barriers have fallen away.
In the meantime, the Supreme Court has removed legal barriers to the government's acquisition of personal information by allowing it to obtain the records of banks, telephone companies and other businesses without a warrant. This combination of legal and technological changes has laid the foundation for a fishbowl society in which citizens can be objects of continual surveillance.
Americans have long been defined by our privacy values. We have fiercely defended what Justice Louis Brandeis called "our right to be left alone." It is only in the assurance of privacy that free thoughts and free exercise of rights can be truly exercised. Such privacy evaporates with doubt; it is why the Constitution seeks to avoid the chilling effect of uncertainty in government searches and seizures.
Yet, the problem has been that these programs have been revealed and analyzed in isolation. Each insular program has been defended in insular terms. It is just domestic telephone numbers or just international transactions. Citizens have become accustomed to a steady stream of secret programs and new forms of government monitoring. It is something that our fiercely independent ancestors would have never imagined.
Privacy is dying in America -- not with a fight but a yawn.
JONATHAN TURLEY is a law professor at George Washington University.
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
*****
TRUTHOUT
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Los Angeles CA, 90014
Editor, Marc Ash
Tel: 1.213.489.1971
E-mail: ma@truthout.com
- Wednesday, 28 June 2006 -
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3. AN IRAQI WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ
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Perspective
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/062806A.shtml
By Dahr Jamail
Recent days have found a media feeding frenzy at the trough of the "National Reconciliation" plan by the US puppet "prime minister" of Iraq, Nuri al-Maliki. This "plan" was clearly a political move orchestrated from within Pentagon and State Department circles in preparation for the upcoming November mid-term elections in the US and has effectively changed, on the ground in Iraq, approximately nothing.
Broadcast by the corporate media and lapped up by US politicians and other groups, the day after it was announced the "plan" had its key element - that of granting amnesty for resistance fighters, removed. Apparently, the "plan" aimed to show some sort of political progress in Iraq.
It is amazing to witness that people, even many within the anti-war movement in the US, seem willing to believe anything presented by Maliki, including this "plan." A man who was inserted into his position after Jack Straw and Condoleezza Rice visited Baghdad in order to brush Jaafari, the prime minister chosen by the supposedly-elected Iraqi parliament, aside. Do we need any clearer evidence of who pulls the strings of Maliki?
The aim of the "plan" seems to be to give the impression that the Iraqi resistance should cooperate with the occupiers and their puppet government, a regime which, rather than serving Iraqis, works diligently to serve themselves. This "plan" was offered by an illegitimate government that clearly does not serve the interest of the Iraqi people. For if this so-called Iraqi government truly represented the wishes of the vast majority of Iraqis, the first thing they would have done when they came into power would have been to demand a withdrawal of all foreign occupation forces and demand reparations from the occupiers.
Do we need any more proof after three devastating years of occupation that the "political process" in Iraq has solved nothing and remains a total failure?
Iraqi resistance groups rejected the "plan" because they do not recognize the Iraqi "government" as a legitimate entity. These same resistance groups understand that under international law, the current Iraqi "government" controls nothing outside of the "green zone," and its existence violates the Geneva Conventions. In addition, the Iraqi government's "army," composed of various sectarian and/or ethnic groups, rather than being an effective, cohesive military, is nothing more than a haphazard collage of militias and death squads loyal only to their own various militia or religious leaders.
This "army" has brought nothing but chaos, suffering and death to every city, town, village or institution it has visited, and while sectarian and ethnic politics are played out in the so-called Iraqi government, the agenda of the Bush administration rolls forward unabated.
One must look behind the media frenzy around the "plan" to get a clearer idea of what is actually occurring in Iraq.
I recently spoke with Antonia Juhasz, author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. A foreign policy expert, Juhasz writes, "The corporations, the neoconservatives, and the George W. Bush administration are three interlocking groups with fluid demarcations. Iraq represents several things to these players: oil, wealth, regional power, and global power. Iraq presents them with the first opportunity for a truly imperial invasion [And] as president Bush has repeatedly said, Iraq is only the beginning"
At the World Peace Forum in Vancouver, Canada, Juhasz told me that the Bush/Cheney junta and their cronies are having great success in Iraq. "Iraq is producing and exporting almost as much oil as it was prior to the invasion," she said, "and Exxon, Chevron, Conoco, Shell, BP and Marathon are all profiting from it."
Juhasz added that if there isn't massive change in Iraq soon, all of the US imposed economic contracts (25-40 year contracts), will effectively eviscerate what is left of the demolished Iraqi economy. In two months, laws will be passed by the puppet government, and six months after this the contracts of the Western companies, (read "Big Oil") will be implemented.
"Production Sharing Agreements (PSA's) are what the Bush administration and the corporations they serve want," Juhasz told me, "This enables the US oil companies to have control and access to oil that they didn't have access to before the war. And as we all know, that is what this has been about all along."
She added that the permanent military bases in Iraq are to be used for providing security for the oil companies.
When one looks at the tragic situation on the ground in Iraq today, it is and always has been clear that the objective of the US military in Iraq has never had anything to do with providing security to the Iraqi people.
In contrast to the seemingly rosy "plan" presented by Maliki, I offer an update from my friend in the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya in Baghdad:
Habibi,
"I'm still living alone at home, with everybody in my family out of the critical area. For the 5th day the black crows (Al-Mahdi Army, Sadr's militia) have been trying to get inside Adhamiya, in vain, from all directions. The fighting has been continuous, from 8 o'clock at night until early in the mornings.
"Last night, the fighting was from all directions and started at 11:30 p.m. and ended at 3 o'clock in the morning. Six were killed yesterday in the southern part of our neighborhood. Anter Square, the main part of the city, is guarded by the Iraqi National Guard (Sunni Personnel) who were using heavy machine guns to defend the people of Adhamiya. In the other parts of Adhamiya, the river side was guarded by civilians of the Mujahedin. The fighting has been very severe, but the Shia militia did not get inside the area.
"Why do the Americans and the militias they are backing cut the wires of our electricity every day? Isn't it sufficient to have electricity less than four hours per day? Is that not enough suffering to please them? For the fifth time we have repaired the wires.
"The Mehdi and the Americans want people to leave the area but they will not succeed. We are ready to repair our electricity at any time and the transformers have been changed twice this month. We will not give up, no matter what. We will not give up our way of living. This is just a small part of the reality the people of Adhamiya are living."
Meanwhile, a refugee from Ramadi recently found his way to Baghdad. Imagine coming into a city seeking refuge where large districts, like the aforementioned, are under siege. The man, Ahmed, reported the following to my colleague Nora Barrows at KPFA radio about the condition in his city, which is being assaulted by US forces:
"There were many helicopters, and the market area was burned while the helicopters were shelling. For instance, there were clashes in the main street of Ramadi by the mosque. Most of the bullets and bombs were coming from the sky, and they burned many stores and cars that used to belong to civilians. When they attacked the market area, there was a car parked close by and it was shot and bombed. People said, "My life is worth more than a car," so they tried to stay indoors or they tried to take shelter inside a mosque. Anything that moved - cars, people, anything - they got bombed and shot at.
"The weapons of the American troops were very hard to identify. They have everything and they carry all kinds of weapons with them. You can see them carrying every kind of weapon they can, such as grenades, M-16s and many other kinds that we have never seen before. They use tear gas and grenades very often. For instance, there were two big tanks entering a very narrow street shelling everything: cars, houses, generators. They shot at whatever they could target. People could not look from the windows because of the [American] snipers. I saw the Americans in their tanks checking the areas. They were very hesitant and scared to leave their tank. They didn't even look from the tank's window because they were afraid of being attacked or shot at. Fighters were everywhere."
Things have grown so terrible in Baghdad that my friend whose neighborhood has been under attack by one of the Shia militias went to the main bus station in the capital in order to look into leaving. This is a man who when I've requested he leave for his own safety told me, "Mr. Dahr, I cannot leave. My heart is in Baghdad."
This is what he wrote me about his trip to the bus station:
"Hafidh Al-Daqi is a square in Baghdad where the buses leave towards Amman and Damascus. It's in the middle of Baghdad near the broadcasting station. The area received attacks from personnel from the Interior Ministry for the third time, and the most recent attack (last week) was followed by twenty workers there being kidnapped. They were kidnapped by the Interior commandos while officials from that ministry denied any relation with it.
"Yesterday the area was attacked once more, and today I was there to see what was going on. I found hundreds of people from all generations with their bags ready to leave for Amman or Damascus. I was shocked to see all of these Iraqis leaving. I asked a 40-year-old man who sells tickets, Abdul Sattar Aboud, what it cost to ride on a bus of 40 people. He replied, "It's 120,000 Iraqi Dinar ($80 - The average monthly wage in Iraq is $150.) for a chair in an air conditioned coach, but people are ready to pay whatever is necessary in order to escape, since they are very eager to leave. There are no people coming back to Iraq, so that's why the prices are of little concern to them. My office was smashed ten days ago in the last attack. I lost three of my workers. I don't know who took them or where they are now.
The mother of one of those detained by the Interior commandos, 65-year-old Um Abass, was there looking for her son. She told me, "My son Abbas was working with this office for three years. He is in his middle thirties, married with three kids, and he was very satisfied to work here so he could feed his wife and three kids. Only God knows how they are going to live with no supporter now. I won't leave this office unless my son comes back. Our neighbors are looking for him every day. They go to the morgue daily, and whenever they hear a body has been found anywhere. All we have is God to look out for us now. I blame the government for this lack of security. Why do the commandos come with their official cars and kidnap those who are not responsible for any of the violence?"
She started to cry. She was moaning for her son.
A manager at the bus terminal, 70 year-old Ahmed Alwan told me there were no vacancies. "You cannot find a seat now, and reservations for them for the next ten days on all our vehicles are impossible," he told me when I asked about buying a ticket. "Come back in a week and then we will give you the prices."
I asked him if there was any way to find a seat if I came back tomorrow. "No way," he replied. I asked what a seat cost now if one was available. "125,000 Iraqi Dinar ($83), and within a week it might be increased. Yesterday here the shootings were everywhere and scared the passengers. Everybody hid wherever there was a place to hide. Two of the passengers were injured and taken to the hospital. Yet still you see, despite the threat of being killed here, everyone is trying desperately to leave."
Meanwhile, the oil companies and other corporate cronies who the Bush cabal represents are making great progress in solidifying their presence in Iraq.
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of US war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City in January 2006. He writes regularly for TruthOut, Inter Press Service, Asia Times and TomDispatch, and maintains his own web site, dahrjamailiraq.com.
Copyright 2006 Truthout
*****
THE CONSORTIUM FOR INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM
Suite 102-231, 2200 Wilson Blvd.
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E-mail: consortnew@aol.com
Web: http://www.consortiumnews.com
- Tuesday, June 27, 2006 -
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
By Robert Parry
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/062706.html
Author Ron Suskind's account of Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine" -- the idea that if a terrorist threat is deemed even one percent likely the United States must act as if it's a certainty -- supplies a missing link in understanding the evolving madness of the Bush administration's national security strategy.
A one-percent risk threshold is so low that it negates any serious analysis that seeks to calibrate dangers within the complex array of possibilities that exist in the real world. In effect, it means that any potential threat that crosses the administration's line of sight will exceed one percent and thus must be treated as a clear and present danger.
The fallacy of the doctrine is that pursuing one-percent threats like certainties is not just a case of choosing to be safe rather than sorry. Instead, it can suck the pursuer into a swollen river of other dangers, leading to a cascading torrent of adverse consequences far more dangerous than the original worry.
For instance, George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq may have eliminated the remote possibility that Saddam Hussein would someday develop a nuclear bomb and share it with al-Qaeda. (Some intelligence analysts put that scenario at less than one percent, although Bush called it a "gathering danger.")
But the U.S. military invasion of Iraq had the unintended consequence of bolstering the conviction in North Korea and Iran that having the bomb may be the only way to fend off the United States.
The unending scenes of bloodshed in Iraq also have inflamed anti-American passions in other Middle East countries, including Pakistan which already possesses nuclear weapons and is governed by fragile pro-U.S. dictator Pervez Musharraf.
So, while eradicating one unlikely nightmare scenario -- Hussein's mushroom cloud in the hands of Osama bin-Laden -- the Bush administration has increased the chances that the other two points on Bush's "axis of evil," North Korea and Iran, will push for nuclear weapons and that Pakistan's Islamic fundamentalists, already closely allied with Osama bin-Laden, will oust Musharraf and gain control of existing nuclear weapons.
In other words, eliminating one "one-percent risk" may have created several other dangers which carry odds of catastrophe far higher than one percent. Bush now must decide whether to swat at these new one-plus-percent risks, which, in turn, could lead to even greater dangers.
Say, for example, that Bush orders air strikes against Iran's suspected nuclear sites and kills large numbers of civilians in the process. That could trigger riots in Pakistan and lead to Musharraf's downfall, putting Islamic extremists in control of nuclear weapons immediately, instead of possibly years into the future.
An attack on Iran also could backfire on the United States in Iraq, where Iranian-allied Shiite militias could retaliate against vulnerable U.S. and British troops, raising the death toll and endangering the entire U.S. mission in Iraq.
Swallowing Flies
In effect, Bush has found himself in a geopolitical version of "the little old lady who swallowed a fly." As the children's ditty goes, the little old lady next swallows a spider to catch the fly but soon finds that the spider "tickles inside her." So, she engorges other animals, in escalating size, to eliminate each previous animal. Eventually, she swallows a horse and "is dead of course."
Similarly, if Bush seeks to eradicate a succession of one-percent threats, he could well find himself trapped within a growing web of interrelated consequences, each pulling in their own entangling complexities. The end result could leave the United States in a much worse predicament than when the process began.
Charging headstrong after one-percent risks also makes you vulnerable to getting lured into traps. Al-Qaeda strategists, for instance, understood that the 9/11 attacks would lead to a furious reaction from the United States and welcomed the prospect that the American military would strike back at targets in the Islamic world.
Al-Qaeda hoped that the United States would overreact and thus sharpen what al-Qaeda saw as the contradictions within the Islamic world, forcing Muslims to take sides either with the "crusaders" and their regional allies or with the revolt against those forces.
Al-Qaeda's gamble was that the United States might strike a well-aimed, powerful blow that would eliminate al-Qaeda's leadership and its key supporters without alienating the larger Muslim populations.
But in late November and early December 2001, the failure to cut off escape routes at Tora Bora, near the Afghan-Pakistani border allowed Osama bin-Laden to evade capture along with Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's second in command.
Then, Bush -- prematurely celebrating victory in Afghanistan -- shifted the U.S. military's focus to Iraq, which had long been an obsession with Bush and his neoconservative advisers. Bush and Cheney judged that Saddam Hussein represented another one-percent-plus danger that required eliminating.
Perception Management
But there remained a political problem in the United States. The American people, while strongly favoring retaliation against al-Qaeda, were less convinced about the need to launch a series of "preemptive wars" against nations that were not implicated in 9/11.
Though the "one-percent doctrine" may transcend the need for any hard evidence among policymakers, it did not eliminate the political need to generate public support behind a war effort, especially when even casual observers could note that the new target country -- Iraq -- posed no immediate threat to the United States.
So, the Bush administration saw little choice but to engage in exaggerations and outright falsehoods, what the CIA calls "perception management." Bush, Cheney and their subordinates spoke in absolute terms about evidence of the Iraqi threat, including vast stockpiles of terrifying unconventional weapons and secret work on a nuclear bomb.
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney told a VFW convention on Aug. 26, 2002. "There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth."
It's now clear that Cheney was wildly overstating the level of confidence within the U.S. intelligence community about Hussein's WMD programs. There was little hard evidence at all, more a case of conventional wisdom about unconventional weapons than actual intelligence reporting.
CIA analysts also didn't believe that Hussein had any intent of using whatever WMD he did have unless his nation was attacked or he was cornered.
But intelligence took on a different dimension inside the "one-percent doctrine," a strategy that cherished action over information. In the new book, The One Percent Doctrine, Suskind describes Cheney first enunciating his new approach when he heard about Pakistani physicists discussing nuclear weapons with al-Qaeda.
"If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response," Cheney said. "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. ... It's about our response."
Suskind reports that Cheney's new "standard of action ... would frame events and responses from the administration for years to come. The Cheney Doctrine. Even if there's just a one percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. ...
"This doctrine -- the one percent solution -- divided what had largely been indivisible in the conduct of American foreign policy: analysis and action. Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence,' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."
Manipulation
By making careful evaluation of the evidence irrelevant, however, the U.S. government made itself vulnerable to willful deceptions by interested parties, such as Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, which easily could funnel enough disinformation into the decision-making process to push decisions over the one-percent brim.
American enemies also could manipulate the process by exaggerating their goals. For instance, Bush and Cheney have repeatedly defended the continuation of the U.S. military operation in Iraq by citing the supposed goal of Islamic extremists to build an empire from Spain to Indonesia.
But the real prospect for such an empire is miniscule, arguably close to zero. After all, prior to 9/11, nearly all key al-Qaeda leaders had been driven from their home countries and chased to Afghanistan, one of the most remote corners of the earth.
These al-Qaeda leaders had lost battles with fellow Muslims in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Though heroes to some Islamists, al-Qaeda leaders were dangerous but fringe operatives on the run.
Without the clumsy intervention of the United States and Great Britain in Iraq, al-Qaeda had few prospects for any significant expansion of its power base.
In an intercepted letter, purportedly written in 2005 by Zawahiri to Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, al-Qaeda's second in command fretted about the problems that would occur if the United States military withdrew from Iraq.
The "Zawahiri letter" cautioned that an American withdrawal might prompt the "mujahedeen" in Iraq to "lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal." To avert this military collapse if the United States did leave, the letter called for selling the foreign fighters on a broader vision of an Islamic "caliphate" in the Middle East, although only along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, nothing as expansive as a global empire.
But the "Zawahiri letter" indicated that even this more modest "caliphate" was just an "idea" that he mentioned "only to stress ... that the mujahedeen must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq." [See Consortiumnews.com's "Bush's Latest Iraq War Lies."]
Brer Rabbit
In other words, assuming the "Zawahiri letter" is accurate, al-Qaeda's leaders wanted to keep the United States bogged down in Iraq because that allowed the terrorists to swell their ranks with new fighters and to use the Iraq War as a training ground to harden them into dangerous militants.
The one-percent doctrine, therefore, empowers America's enemies to influence U.S. policy in ways favorable to them. It lets al-Qaeda play the role of Brer Rabbit from the Uncle Remus tales, where the wily rabbit begs not to be thrown into the briar patch when that is exactly where he wants to go.
Bush has said the United States must take the word of the enemy seriously and act accordingly. But what if the enemy is exaggerating his capabilities or his goals? Do the enemy's words alone push matters beyond the one percent threshold and force the United States into responses even if they are not in America's best interests?
The one-percent doctrine is also developing a domestic corollary. Any home-grown threat -- no matter how unlikely -- must bring down the full force of U.S. law enforcement, as happened in last week's arrest of seven young black men in Miami for a terrorist plot that one FBI official called more "aspirational than operational."
On June 23, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales conceded that the men had no weapons, no equipment and no real plans. Mostly, the seven seem to have been encouraged by an FBI informant posing as an al-Qaeda operative to talk loosely about waging a "full ground war" against the United States.
As absurd as this notion of a "full ground war" was -- given the hapless nature of the alleged warriors -- Gonzales said, "left unchecked, these homegrown terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda."
Gonzales's domestic declaration rang with an echo of Dick Cheney's one-percent doctrine. If there is the slightest risk of terrorist activities, "it's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence," Cheney reportedly said. "It's about our response."
Obvious Flaws
But another curious aspect of this one-percent doctrine is how obvious its flaws are. Wouldn't even the most dimwitted foreign policy novice recognize the absurdity of striking out at one-percent risks around the world?
John Dunne wrote that "no man is an island, entire of itself," meaning that every person is connected to other people. But surely, not even George W. Bush thought that Iraq was an island, somehow disconnected from a host of intersecting regional and global relationships.
The answer to that conundrum might simply be that the one-percent doctrine is less a doctrine than another excuse used by the Bush administration to justify actions, such as invading Iraq, that it always wanted to do.
If the slimmest possibility of grievous harm -- such as Saddam Hussein developing nuclear weapons and then slipping one to Osama bin-Laden -- can be cited to trump more circumspect policymakers, then it could be a powerful way to defeat bureaucratic rivals who show up at meetings with binders of intelligence analyses under their arms.
Then, when Bush and Cheney want to ignore other threats, they can simply revert to the posture of careful leaders not ready to jump hastily into an unfamiliar thicket. In other words, whether or not to invoke the one-percent doctrine gives them the ultimate debate-stopping argument.
Nevertheless, if Suskind is right and Bush is following the one-percent doctrine as his guiding light in the post-9/11 world, the American people can expect to find themselves led into an endless series of wars that only worsen the dangers.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Copyright 2006 The Consortium for Independent Journalism
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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
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- Wednesday, 28 June 2006 -
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Manufacturing "terror" as a means of intimidation
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/miam-j28.shtml
By Bill Van Auken
Within 48 hours of the US Justice Department's startling announcement Friday of the round-up of a "home-grown" terrorist cell in Miami, the media had all but dropped the story.
Its initial response, particularly that of the broadcast news outlets, was to amplify the government's lurid charges, warning of a conspiracy "even worse than September 11," including a supposed plot to blow up the nation's tallest building, the Sears Tower in Chicago. The television news channels carried live shots of the building, as if hijacked airplanes were about to plow into them.
As details of the supposed plot and the identity of the alleged conspirators came more sharply into focus, however, the media backed away. Not only was the Chicago skyscraper in no danger, there also existed no plot, much less the means of carrying one out. The entire government case was so manifestly bogus that not even the right-wing fabulists at Fox News could sustain it.
Nevertheless, the initial sensationalism and fear-mongering had an effect. By the time public defenders were appointed for the seven men indicted in the case, the attorneys' protests that their clients were victims of blatant government entrapment received a minute fraction of the attention given the government's "terror" charges at the outset.
Who are the seven young men--Narseal Batiste, 32, Patrick Abraham, 26, Burson Augustin, 21, Rothschild Augustine, 22, Naudimar Herrera, 22, Lyglenson Lemorin, 31, and Stanley Grant Phanor, 31--whose mug shots were broadcast into millions of American homes as the supposed new "face of terror?" They include a former Federal Express driver, two Haitian immigrants--one a legal resident and the other undocumented--and several other individuals from Miami's deeply impoverished and predominantly black Liberty City neighborhood.
What will happen to them? Despite the transparent attempts by both the government and the media to "lower expectations" in relation to the case, and the near unanimous view of the legal community that the case is at best "thin" and at worst a crude exercise in state provocation and entrapment, the seven defendants remain in federal lockup. They face the very real threat of spending the rest of their lives in prison for the sole "crime" of having allowed themselves to be drawn into supposedly incriminating conversations with an undercover FBI informant/agent provocateur.
There was neither criminal action nor a credible plan to commit a criminal act. No explosives and not a single weapon were found in the raids carried out by FBI SWAT teams in Miami. As one federal official put it, the "plot" was "more aspirational than operational."
The real question is whose "aspirations" played the decisive role in this episode--those of the defendants, or those of the government? There is every indication that by means of a provocation in Miami--the latest in a long line of similar cases--the government was pursuing definite political objectives of the most reactionary sort, with chilling indifference towards the fate of those it ensnared in its fabrication of a "terrorist threat." As far as the organizers of Bush's "global war on terror" are concerned, the seven young men from Liberty City were utterly disposable people.
If there is anything unique about the Miami case, it is the fact that the victims of the provocation are non-Muslim African Americans in the poorest neighborhood in one of America's poorest cities, rather than immigrants from Islamic countries. The modus operandi is not new. It has been employed by the federal authorities in case after case. In each of them, highly motivated agent provocateurs--some paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, others offered leniency on criminal charges--were dispatched to produce a "terrorist threat" where none existed.
To cite just a few of the more prominent cases:
* The conviction last month of 24-year-old Shahawar Matin Siraj, a Pakistani immigrant in New York City, for a supposed conspiracy to bomb the 34th Street subway station and other targets. The "plot" was the handiwork of a paid informant of the New York City police intelligence division, who earned $100,000 for ensnaring Siraj and another man, both of whom pleaded guilty before trial. Again, there was neither a criminal act nor any means of committing one--no weapons, no explosives. The informant apparently was the one who first suggested the bombing plot, then offered to obtain explosives and egged on the defendants by showing them pictures of Iraqis tortured by US guards at Abu Ghraib.
* In May of last year, two African-American Muslims, Dr. Rafiq Sabir, a Florida physician, and Tarik Shah, a well-known jazz musician, were arrested on charges of offering assistance, in the form of medical care and martial arts training, to Islamists waging "jihad." Once again, the entire case is based on alleged conversations with a government informant, who, as in the Miami case, supposedly administered an oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda. Again, no bombs, no weapons, no acts, merely a paid informant entrapping two innocent men in allegedly incriminating conversations.
* In Lodi, California, the FBI obtained the convictions of an ice cream vendor and his son, both Pakistani immigrants, through the work of another informant, who was reportedly recruited from a $7-an-hour job at a convenience store and paid nearly $250,000 to infiltrate the local Muslim community and entrap the pair. The charge against them of lending material support to terrorism was based upon telephone conversations in which the informant urged the younger man to attend an Al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan, though there was no evidence that he ever did so.
* A local Muslim cleric and a pizzeria owner in Albany, New York are to go on trial in September in a case involving a convoluted--and fictitious--scheme to purchase a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, supposedly to assassinate a Pakistani official. The entire "plot" was concocted by an FBI informant for the purpose of ensnaring the pair. He sprung it on them after the pizzeria owner asked him for a $5,000 loan to bail out his bankrupt business. The informant offered to let him keep $5,000 if he agreed to hold onto $50,000 that was supposedly to be used to buy the grenade launcher. Again, there was no act of violence, no means of carrying out such an act, no ties to terrorist groups and no plot, outside of the one invented by the FBI.
Each of these "terror cases" has received the same treatment from the media as the Miami arrests--screaming headlines and sensationalist broadcast claims echoing the government charges, followed by relative silence as it became clear that the accusations lacked any substance and that the defendants never posed the slightest threat to anyone.
What begins to emerge is a picture of a "homeland security" police-bureaucratic dictatorship that acts with unspeakable cruelty, destroying people--for the most part poor, hapless immigrants--to further patently political aims.
The main target of these exercises is not the defendants--they are merely collateral damage. It is the American people as a whole. This is a government of ruthless men that stages provocation after provocation with the aim of spreading fear and intimidating popular opposition to policies of aggressive war abroad and social reaction and attacks on democratic rights at home.
For nearly five years, the Bush administration has implemented virtually all of its policies in the name of a "global war on terrorism." It has relentlessly invoked the horrific loss of life in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as justification for a long-planned war to conquer Iraq and its oil wealth, and the arrogation of unprecedented dictatorial powers by the White House. The ostensible political opposition in the Democratic Party has fully embraced the "war on terror," while occasionally arguing that it is being mismanaged by the Bush administration.
The fact remains that every supposed terrorist threat foisted upon the public by the administration has proven to be a government-orchestrated provocation. The events of September 11 themselves have never been seriously investigated. How and why the government in Washington allowed them to take place--despite ample forewarnings of impending attacks involving the use of hijacked commercial jets as bombs, and even surveillance of the hijackers by US intelligence--has yet to be explained to the American people.
The need to sow fear and intimidate public opinion with supposed terrorist threats grows in direct proportion to the decline of popular support for the policies of both major parties, a political shift that can find no means of expression within the existing political setup. The way in which these provocations are organized and executed is evidence of an absolutely ruthless government that is bound neither by scruples nor serious scrutiny on the part of Congress, the courts or the media.
To the extent that schemes like the latest indictments in Miami are so quickly and thoroughly revealed--despite the best efforts of the mass media--to be shams, the threat grows that the desperate elements in control of the US government will organize something more convincing, in the form of an actual terrorist incident that, like September 11, will claim the lives of innocent Americans.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
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6. THE NEW HISTORY OF THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND
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MONTHLY REVIEW
June 2006
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0606jacobs.htm
by Ron Jacobs
Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (San Francisco: AK Press, 2006), 450 pages, paperback, $20.00.
Despite its many detractors and small numbers, the Weather-man/Weather Underground Organization has emerged in the past ten years as a major topic in the growing history of the 1960s. Many of those who knew the group during its existence--personally or in name only--often wonder why this is so. After all, goes this train of thought, Weatherman/Weather Underground represented all that was wrong with the movement against the war in Vietnam and against racism. The group encouraged violence and represented the epitome of arrogance. What about the rest of us?
As the author of the first of a number of recent books about the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), I heard this refrain quite often during the small book tour I took after the publication of my book back in 1997. The only answer I felt necessary to provide then was that if we truly wanted to understand history, then we must examine it all. This meant that WUO was worth examining along with the New Mobe, SCLC, the Black Panthers, and all the other organizations and coalitions that were part of the historical period known in the United States as the sixties. This answer is still met with resistance by those historians and nostalgia buffs that like to pretend that groups like the Panthers and WUO were aberrations and represent the "bad sixties" as opposed to the "good sixties" of Martin Luther King Jr., the early SDS, and George McGovern. Besides the obvious superficiality of this perception, it is also antipolitical.
The most recent book related to the WUO is Dan Berger's Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. In his introduction, Berger, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, political radical, and writer, makes it clear that he does not subscribe to the good sixties, bad sixties paradigm. Indeed, Berger understands quite well that "the 'dream' was killed, mostly by the state or by those acting in its interest...At the same time, cities across the country rose up in rebellion after rebellion. Therein lies one of the greatest fallacies of the Tale of Two Sixties: it obscures why people embraced radicalism and militancy. Without understanding the impact of state repression, radical movements don.t make sense." This historical accuracy informs Berger's text as he winds through the history of WUO and its successors. Furthermore, it informs his discussion of the meaning of that history for today's anti-imperialist activists.
The facts presented here are well-documented and were derived from a multitude of primary and secondary sources, as well as from personal interviews with former members of the WUO. The interviewees represented various positions within the organization itself and lend a credible insider's look at life in the political underground of the United States of the 1970s. In addition, the text denotes the larger debates within the movement and insists that people do make life-altering decisions based on politics--even in the United States of America.
Like any vibrant left organization, Weatherman/WUO constantly debated politics and tactics. This is reflected in their brief history. While the role of political violence (and the shape that violence should take) was fundamental to the group's formation and existence, even more important was its relationship with the struggle for black liberation in the United States. Indeed, not only was that relationship the reason for the group's birth, it was also the reason for the group's death according to Berger and those former members with whom he seems to agree.
So, what was the intended relationship between Weatherman/WUO and the black revolutionary struggle in the United States? If one takes a look at their founding document "You Don't Need a Weatherman..." one finds these words:
"The only third path is to build a white movement which will support the blacks in moving as fast as they have to and are able to, and still itself keep up with that black movement enough so that white revolutionaries share the cost and the blacks don't have to do the whole thing alone."
In other words, the primary role of the white revolutionary organization was to support the black revolution for liberation. This, in turn, meant that one's concept of black people's position in the United States and within the U.S. working class was the basis for any type of solidarity with other revolutionaries and activists. Were they just part of the working class? Did they experience a special oppression due to their race? Were they a separate nation? Weatherman subscribed to the latter argument: that African Americans were indeed a separate nation based on their special history and the nature of their oppression.
Once this relationship was understood within Weather, everything else followed. Its use of political violence was partially intended to take some heat off of revolutionary black groups like the Black Panthers, while its struggle "against the people" in the fall of 1969 was intended to draw a line between those who were willing to fight and die for the black revolution and those who weren't. Much like John Brown and his soldiers, Weatherman/WUO attempted to offer themselves to the struggle for black freedom in the United States.
After a Weatherman-sponsored week of protests and street fighting in Chicago in October 1969--a week that became known as the Days of Rage--Weather retreated and regrouped, ultimately deciding to wage a campaign of bombings and other armed attacks on law enforcement and the U.S. government. This meant that many members would go underground, many would leave the group, and some would operate as aboveground supporters. This entire process was accelerated when three members of the organization died in an explosion that occurred while one of the group was making bombs in the basement of a New York City townhouse on March 6, 1970. These deaths not only forced the remaining members underground, they also forced an organization-wide reevaluation of political violence, with a decision being made that the group would no longer adhere to their belief that the most violent action was necessarily the most revolutionary.
This decision was not lightly taken, and according to Berger's research, this decision widened some differences in the group between those who supported it and those who saw it as essentially taking advantage of their class and race position to lessen their personal danger. Apparently, part of the argument of those who disagreed with the decision was that they viewed their use of violence as a measure of sincerity and commitment to the black liberation struggle.
Berger begins each chapter of Outlaws of America with a quote from former member and prisoner David Gilbert, who is serving a seventy-five-year-to-life sentence for his role in the failed 1981 Brink's robbery outside of Nyack, New York. This expropriation was a joint effort of the Black Liberation Army and the May 19th Organization and resulted in the deaths of three police officers after the robbers were stopped during the getaway. Both of these organizations were small in numbers and committed to armed struggle. In addition, both were descended from the Black Panther Party and Weather Underground Organization, respectively. Gilbert was a Columbia University student when he joined SDS and was one of those Weather members most committed to both armed struggle and the theory that white-skinned people in the United States had no choice but to support the black revolutionary struggle as the only true revolutionary struggle.
The insistence that the oppression of black people in the United States was one of the fundamental (if not the fundamental) issues that white-skinned revolutionaries in the United States had to deal with was a position in the New Left that had to be confronted. It ultimately tore apart WUO as the organization tried to construct an approach to communist organizing that would work in the political climate after the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Berger's book subscribes to the argument that Weather's betrayal of its original pledge to build a "white revolutionary movement" to support the black revolutionary movement was the primary internal reason for the group's demise.
As mentioned previously, this argument holds that the reaction to the March 6, 1970, deaths and subsequent attempts to organize the political element of the sixties counterculture constituted but one more example of a U.S. leftist organization turning its back on the black struggle. To this element of the group, the prime example of this betrayal was the freeing of drug guru Timothy Leary from a California prison in September 1970. Why should Weather free a drug guru and not an imprisoned black liberation fighter? This analysis considered that "betrayal" to be exacerbated by the "New Morning" communique in December of that year--a statement full of counterculture rhetoric and language extolling the youth movement and its use of marijuana and psychedelics. The communique was criticized by the New York wing of the Panthers, whose communal experience with drugs was quite different than that of white middle-class youths.
By the time 1974 and 1975 rolled around, this critique had extended to WUO's attempts to provide a theoretical basis for its future via their publication known as Prairie Fire. This book, which is a succinct and reasonable examination of the state of the United States and the anti-imperialist movement, was seen as another betrayal of the group's original commitment to the black revolution. The Hard Times economic conference and the documentary film Underground were also attacked for similar reasons. Of course, by this time, it was not the primarily white counterculture that was the focus of WUO's organizing efforts. Like almost every other leftist formation in the United States by that time, their focus was shifting to the working class of the United States. Despite their analysis that acknowledged the multiracial makeup of the working class (as opposed to other groups like the Revolutionary Union that continued to view it as primarily white and male), the organization was sharply criticized as racist by an ad hoc people of color caucus at the Hard Times Conference who took aim at their aboveground allies, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC). For an organization that defined its very essence by its antiracism this criticism caused major cracks. Some WUO members continued to argue for a more traditional class-based organizing approach--an approach that removed much of the nation status previously ascribed to black people in the United States by WUO. The other members continued to insist on adhering to their revolutionary black nationalist-inspired analysis. Meanwhile, this ongoing debate was overshadowed by the necessity of individuals to stay together and help each other hide from law enforcement. The combination of the two phenomena led to a non-political period within the organization.
One of the advantages given Berger due to the timing of his research was the greater openness of former WUO members to talking about their experiences. Another was the greater availability of government documents detailing law enforcement operations against them and other antiwar and antiracist organizations during the 1960s and 1970s. Berger takes advantage of this and provides the reader with useful information and details about these actions. In today's world where government spying, torture, and persecution are the stuff of daily headlines, this information makes it clear that today's headlines are not new or aberrations. Indeed, they are business-as-usual for law enforcement, only with modern technological enhancements. Berger argues that the repression suffered by the black liberation and antiwar movements was a good part of the reason groups like WUO came into being. Not only were nonviolent and open tactics being shown to be ineffective, went the reasoning of those who went underground, they were providing the police with easy targets for arrest, harassment, and, in some cases, murder. The subsequent history of WUO and other such organizations, however, might seem to prove that their turn toward armed struggle rendered them even less effective than they were before they took that route.
Berger subtitles his book, The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. This is what most clearly separates this text from previous books about the WUO. Berger, being of the generation of radicals that came of age in the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, obviously has a different context than those who gained political awareness in earlier times. This is important because it informs the approach he takes in the book and also because it naturally leads to differing emphases regarding the period of history from which Weather sprang.
Berger's book is one of a very few current books that stresses the politics of racial solidarity. Although the movement against global capitalism is worldwide in scope and includes people of many nations (and consequently many skin tones), it has yet to span the racial divide in the United States in any noticeable way. The same can be said for the movement against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--although there are considerably more U.S. people of color involved in opposing the wars than in the movement against global capitalism.
However, as Berger points out, much of the impetus for today's struggle against U.S. imperialism and its excesses comes from "people of color, from Porto Alegre to Port-au-Prince, from Caracas to Chiapas, Durban to Detroit, Buenos Aires to Brooklyn, the West Bank to Washington." This is in part, as the WUO and other anti-imperialist groups of the early 1970s had already pointed out, because U.S. imperialism is the number one cause of injustice in the world.
Berger writes that the WUO's analysis of the role of prisons in capitalist society, the making of political prisoners, and the need for solidarity with prisoners remains as pertinent today as it was then. As the prison system run by the United States and its client states expands its role beyond serving as a dumping ground for those members of society no longer needed by capitalism into also serving as a holding-pen for those individuals singled out by the state as linked to potentially subversive and "terroristic" activities, the need to insist on the end of such prisons increases. Indeed, the ongoing revelations of mistreatment and murder at the various secret prisons run by the U.S. regime around the world make this insistence a matter of life and death for hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals whose primary crime is often merely being Muslim or Arab.
Outlaws of America measures the Weather Underground by its own yardstick: revolutionary solidarity with third world revolutionaries is the pathway to ending U.S. imperialism. By that definition, this means that the primary role of radicals in the United States is to support those revolutionaries, including those who comprise the black nation in the United States. Although one might disagree with this analysis and its limits, Berger argues that it was the attempt to follow through on this analysis that created the Weather Underground. Likewise, it was the attempt to follow through that caused its demise.
Ron Jacobs is an anti-imperialist activist and a writer. He is the author of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (Verso, 1997).
Copyright 2006 Monthly Review
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FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
U.S. investigations of top arms smugglers connected to the Russian-Israeli mafia have often met with stonewalling by senior officials of the Bush administration. According to a number of former Clinton administration officials, anytime a law enforcement or intelligence investigation leads to anything or anyone connected to the mafia, such as Viktor Bout and his network, the Bush administration shuts down the operation. Some law enforcement officials also suspect that the Russian-Israeli Mafia was behind a mysterious shorting of airline and insurance stocks shortly before 9-11. ... From his base in Sharjah in the Gulf, Bout was servicing Ariana Afghan Airline flights to Kandahar, Afghanistan. These flights were believed to be ferrying weapons and Al Qaeda and Taliban volunteers to Afghanistan, and the Clinton National Security Council believed Bout was aiding terrorism. ... But when the Bush administration took over...National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice told U.S. intelligence to "look but don't touch." -- Wayne Madsen, Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops, & Big Oil [Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2006] p. 174.
Contents: Number 733
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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
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- Saturday, 24 June 2006 -
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1. MIAMI 'TERROR' ARRESTS--A GOVERNMENT PROVOCATION
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/miam-j24.shtml
By Bill Van Auken
There are many incongruities surrounding the arrest of seven men from the impoverished Liberty City neighborhood of Miami on charges of conspiracy to "wage war on the United States" that suggest it, like so many previous "terrorist plots" announced by the Bush administration, is a government-inspired provocation mounted for reactionary political ends.
None of the claims made by the government and repeated uncritically by the media concerning the arrest of these young working-class men can be accepted as good coin. Both the flimsiness of the criminal indictment and the lurid headlines surrounding it mark this event as an escalation in the anti-democratic conspiracies of the Bush administration.
There is every indication that this latest purported terrorist threat--described by some media outlets as "even bigger than September 11"--was manufactured by the FBI, which used an undercover agent posing as a terrorist mastermind to entrap those targeted for arrest.
While the Justice Department declared that the arrests had foiled a plot to blow up the tallest building in the US, the Sears Tower in Chicago, authorities in that city assured its residents that there had never been any threat to the structure.
The four-count indictment presented by the Justice Department in a Miami federal court on Friday contains not a single indication of an overt criminal act or even the means to carry one out. The brief 11-page document consists almost entirely of alleged statements made by the defendants to the FBI informant, referred to in quotes throughout the indictment as "the al Qaeda representative."
The government chose to consummate its entrapment plan by unleashing dozens of combat-equipped federal agents, dressed in olive drab fatigues and carrying automatic weapons, on the predominantly African-American Liberty City neighborhood, one of the poorest in the country. Liberty City was the scene of riots that broke out in 1980 after the acquittal of white police officers for the beating death of a black motorist.
On Thursday, the government's paramilitary squads confronted residents with pictures of the accused, demanding to know their whereabouts. The seven defendants are representative of the impoverished working class population of Miami, including Haitian immigrants.
It appears they were targeted by the FBI because they had formed a religious group, calling themselves the "Seas of David," which reportedly incorporated elements of Christianity and Islam. One of their crimes, according to the FBI's deputy director, John Pistole, was that the Seas of David "did not believe the United States government had legal authority over them."
According to some residents of the neighborhood, the group lived together in the warehouse that was raided by the FBI, using it for religious worship and as a base of operations for a construction business.
Elements of the federal indictment are so self-incriminating as to border on the ludicrous. Among the charges are that the defendants "swore an oath of loyalty to al Qaeda." Who administered this oath? The "al Qaeda representative," AKA, the paid informant of the FBI.
Aside from this "loyalty oath" solicited by the FBI, only one of the seven defendants is accused of any overt act, outside of driving the FBI informant to meetings.
The only action with which this one individual is charged--all else is words--is taking pictures of the FBI headquarters in Miami. Who supplied the camera? The "al Qaeda representative"--i.e., the FBI agent provocateur.
The indictment further charges two of the accused with driving "with the 'al Qaeda representative'" to a store in Dade County, Florida to purchase a memory chip for a digital camera to be used for taking reconnaissance photographs of the FBI building. The document does not say who paid for the chip, but there is hardly room for doubt.
In one of the more curious sections of the indictment, one of the accused, Narseal Batiste, is accused of asking the FBI informant to provide various items for his group, including footwear, for which he provided a "list of shoe sizes." Apparently the FBI delivered the shoes.
Pistole, the FBI deputy director, admitted that the supposed plots to blow up buildings had been "more aspirational than operational." In the raids carried out by the FBI squads, no weapons and no explosive substances were found.
"We preempted their plot," declared Pistole. But the indictment and the facts of the case indicate that the alleged plot would never have existed had the government not planned and instigated it in the first place.
At a Washington press conference, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged that the alleged plot had posed no actual danger. He claimed this was because the authorities had intervened "in its earliest stages."
So "early" was the preemption that officials associated with the supposed targets of the plot dismissed the government's indictment. Barbara Carley, the managing director of the Sears Tower, told the press, "Federal and local authorities continue to tell us they've never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that's ever gone beyond just talk."
Her remarks were echoed by Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline, who said, "There never was any credible threat to the Sears Tower at all."
In his press conference, Attorney General Gonzales asserted that the Miami group represented a "new brand of terrorism" created by "the convergence of globalization and technology."
What these words mean is anyone's guess. There is no indication that those charged, who were living in a warehouse in the poorest city in America, had access to any technology, and their supposed contact to the wider world was an informer planted by the FBI. The suggestion that the seven men were a "home-grown" terrorist group inspired by contact with Al Qaeda elements over the Internet is supported neither by evidence nor the charges contained in the government's own indictment.
R. Alexander Acosta, the United States attorney in South Florida, told the media that the defendants had "lived in the United States for most of their lives, but developed a hatred of America." This is presented as though it constituted evidence of a crime.
It is hardly surprising for someone living in Liberty City to hate the poverty and oppression that prevail there, or for Haitian immigrants to despise the imprisonment and repression that Washington metes out to those attempting to escape the brutal conditions imposed by US imperialism upon their homeland.
What is highly noteworthy is that the federal government decided to intervene in this situation to concoct a phony Al Qaeda connection and trumped up "terror plot."
What is the government's motive in manufacturing such a plot? Whose interests are served? Under conditions in which the majority of the American people have turned against the Iraq war and support the withdrawal of American troops, the Bush administration is desperately attempting to once again link its neo-colonial venture in Iraq with a supposed "global war on terror" waged to defend the American people against another 9/11.
To sustain such a fiction, fresh evidence of terrorist threats is periodically required. And it has been forthcoming on a regular basis. Every several months another "conspiracy" is unveiled, invariably involving an FBI informant and hapless individuals ensnared in a plot orchestrated by the government.
Until now, these "sting" operations have been targeted at Muslim immigrants. Last month, for example, Pakistani immigrant Shahawar Siraj in New York City was found guilty of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station in a "plot" that the evidence indicated was based entirely on suggestions from an FBI informant. The FBI agent provocateur taunted the defendant with photographs of Abu Ghraib torture victims and demanded to know how, as a Muslim, he could fail to take action.
Similarly, in Albany, New York two years ago, the FBI recruited a Pakistani immigrant, promising him leniency on minor fraud charges, to ensnare two other immigrants in a fictitious scheme to help a non-existent person buy a weapon for a fake terrorist plot.
These provocations and conspiracies are symptomatic of a government that is both ruthless and desperate. Confronting a population that is increasingly hostile to its political agenda of reaction at home and war abroad, it is driven to manufacture an endless series of terrorist threats aimed at disorienting and intimidating public opinion.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
THE CONSORTIUM FOR INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM
Suite 102-231, 2200 Wilson Blvd.
Arlington, VA 22201
E-mail: consortnew@aol.com
Web: http://www.consortiumnews.com
- Saturday, June 24, 2006 -
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2. TERRORISTS IN MIAMI, OH MY!
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By Robert Parry
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/062406.html
The Bush administration finally took action against alleged terrorists living in plain sight in Miami, but they weren't the right-wing Cuban terrorists implicated in actual acts of terror, such as blowing a civilian Cuban airliner out of the sky. They were seven young black men whose crime was more "aspirational than operational," the FBI said.
As media fanfare over the arrests made the seven young men, many sporting dreadlocks, the new face of the terrorist enemy in America, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales conceded that the men had no weapons or explosives and represented "no immediate threat."
But Gonzales warned that these kinds of homegrown terrorists "may prove to be as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda." [NYT, June 24, 2006]
For longtime observers of political terrorism in South Florida, the aggressive reaction to what may have been the Miami group's loose talk about violence, possibly spurred by an FBI informant posing as an al-Qaeda operative, stands in marked contrast to the U.S. government's see-no-evil approach to notorious Cuban terrorists who have lived openly in Miami for decades.
For instance, the Bush administration took no action in early April 2006, when a Spanish-language Miami television station interviewed Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, who offered a detailed justification for the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight that killed 73 people, including the young members of the Cuban national fencing team.
Bosch refused to admit guilt, but his chilling defense of the bombing -- and the strong evidence that has swirled around his role -- left little doubt of his complicity, even as he lives in Miami as a free man, protected both in the past and present by the Bush family.
The Bush administration also has acted at a glacial pace in dealing with another Cuban exile implicated in the bombing, Luis Posada Carriles, whose illegal presence in Miami was an open secret for weeks in early 2005 before U.S. authorities took him into custody, only after he had held a press conference.
But even then, the administration has balked at sending Posada back to Venezuela where the government of Hugo Chavez -- unlike some of its predecessors -- was eager to prosecute Posada for the Cubana Airlines murders.
Summing up George W. Bush's dilemma in 2005, the New York Times wrote, "A grant of asylum could invite charges that the Bush administration is compromising its principle that no nation should harbor suspected terrorists. But to turn Mr. Posada away could provoke political wrath in the conservative Cuban-American communities of South Florida, deep sources of support and campaign money for President Bush and his brother, Jeb." [NYT, May 9, 2005]
Bush Family Ties
But there's really nothing new about these two terrorists -- and other violent right-wing extremists -- getting protection from the Bush family.
For three decades, both Bosch and Posada have been under the Bush family's protective wing, starting with former President George H.W. Bush (who was CIA director when the airline bombing occurred in 1976) and extending to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and President George W. Bush.
The evidence points to one obvious conclusion: the Bushes regard terrorism -- defined as killing civilians to make a political point -- as justified in cases when their interests match those of the terrorists. In other words, their moral outrage is selective, depending on the identity of the victims.
That hypocrisy was dramatized by the TV interview with Bosch on Miami's Channel 41, which was cited in articles on the Internet by Venezuela's lawyer Jose Pertierra, but was otherwise widely ignored by the U.S. news media. [For Pertierra's story, see Counterpunch, April 11, 2006]
"Did you down that plane in 1976?" asked reporter Juan Manuel Cao.
"If I tell you that I was involved, I will be inculpating myself," Bosch answered, "and if I tell you that I did not participate in that action, you would say that I am lying. I am therefore not going to answer one thing or the other."
But when Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados in 1976, Bosch responded, "In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach."
"But don't you feel a little bit for those who were killed there, for their families?" Cao asked.
"Who was on board that plane?" Bosch responded. "Four members of the Communist Party, five North Koreans, five Guyanese." [Officials tallies actually put the Guyanese dead at 11.]
Bosch added, "Four members of the Communist Party, chico! Who was there? Our enemies..."
"And the fencers?" Cao asked about Cuba's amateur fencing team that had just won gold, silver and bronze medals at a youth fencing competition in Caracas. "The young people on board?"
Bosch replied, "I was in Caracas. I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant. ... She gave a speech filled with praise for the tyrant.
"We had already agreed in Santo Domingo, that everyone who comes from Cuba to glorify the tyrant had to run the same risks as those men and women that fight alongside the tyranny." [The comment about Santo Domingo was an apparent reference to a strategy meeting by a right-wing terrorist organization, CORU, which took place in the Dominican Republic in 1976.]
"If you ran into the family members who were killed in that plane, wouldn't you think it difficult?" Cao asked.
"No, because in the end those who were there had to know that they were cooperating with the tyranny in Cuba," Bosch answered.
In an article about Bosch's remarks, lawyer Pertierra said the answers "give us a glimpse into the mind of the kind of terrorist that the United States government harbors and protects in Miami."
The Posada Case
Bosch was arrested for illegally entering the United States during the first Bush administration, but he was paroled in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush at the behest of the President's eldest son Jeb, then an aspiring Florida politician.
Not only did the first Bush administration free Bosch from jail a decade and a half ago, the second Bush administration has now pushed Venezuela's extradition request for his alleged co-conspirator, Posada, onto the back burner.
The downed Cubana Airlines flight originated in Caracas where Venezuelan authorities allege the terrorist plot was hatched. However, U.S. officials have resisted returning Posada to Venezuela because Hugo Chavez is seen as friendly to Castro's communist government in Cuba.
At a U.S. immigration hearing in 2005, Posada's defense attorney put on a Posada friend as a witness who alleged that Venezuela's government practices torture. Bush administration lawyers didn't challenge the claim, leading the immigration judge to bar Posada's deportation to Venezuela.
In September 2005, Venezuela's Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez called the 77-year-old Posada "the Osama Bin Laden of Latin America" and accused the Bush administration of applying "a cynical double standard" in its War on Terror.
Alvarez also denied that Venezuela practices torture. "There isn't a shred of evidence that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela," Alvarez said, adding that the claim is particularly ironic given widespread press accounts that the Bush administration has abused prisoners at the U.S. military base in Guatanamo Bay, Cuba.
Theoretically, the Bush administration could still extradite Posada to Venezuela to face the 73 murder counts, but it is essentially ignoring Venezuela's extradition request while holding Posada on minor immigration charges of entering the United States illegally.
Meanwhile, Posada has begun maneuvering to gain his freedom. Citing his service in the U.S. military from 1963-65 in Vietnam, Posada has applied for U.S. citizenship, and his lawyer Eduardo Soto has threatened to call U.S. government witnesses, including former White House aide Oliver North, to vouch for Posada's past service to Washington.
Posada became a figure in the Iran-Contra scandal because of his work on a clandestine program to aid Nicaraguan contra rebels fighting Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. The operation was run secretly out of the White House by North with the help of the office of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.
Posada reached Central America in 1985 after escaping from a Venezuelan prison where he had been facing charges from the 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing. Posada, using the name Ramon Medina, teamed up with another Cuban exile, former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who reported regularly to Bush's office.
Posada oversaw logistics and served as paymaster for pilots in the contra-supply operation. When one of the contra-supply planes was shot down inside Nicaragua in October 1986, Posada was responsible for alerting U.S. officials to the crisis and then shutting down the operation's safe houses in El Salvador.
Even after the exposure of Posada's role in the contra-supply operation, the U.S. government made no effort to bring the accused terrorist to justice.
Secret History
As for the Cubana Airlines bombing, declassified U.S. documents show that after the plane was blown out of the sky on Oct. 6, 1976, the CIA, then under the direction of George H.W. Bush, quickly identified Posada and Bosch as the masterminds of the Cubana Airlines bombing.
But in fall 1976, Bush's boss, President Gerald Ford, was in a tight election battle with Democrat Jimmy Carter and the Ford administration wanted to keep intelligence scandals out of the newspapers. So Bush and other officials kept the lid on the investigations. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Still, inside the U.S. government, the facts were known. According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in anti-communist Cuban extremists Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela's intelligence agency, DISIP.
The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia "to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela."
On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch's honor during which Bosch requested cash from the Venezuelan government in exchange for assurances that Cuban exiles wouldn't demonstrate during Andres Perez's planned trip to the United Nations.
"A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, 'we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,' and that 'Orlando has the details,'" the CIA report said.
"Following the 6 October Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory."
The CIA report was sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as well as to the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies, according to markings on the cable.
A Round-up
In South America, investigators began rounding up suspects in the bombing.
Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who had left the Cubana plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb. They named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack.
A search of Posada's apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents.
Posada and Bosch were arrested and charged in Venezuela for the Cubana Airlines bombing, but the men denied the accusations. The case soon became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects were in possession of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets that could embarrass President Andres Perez. The case lingered for almost a decade.
After the Reagan-Bush administration took power in Washington in 1981, the momentum for fully unraveling the mysteries of anti-communist terrorist plots dissipated. The Cold War trumped any concern about right-wing terrorism.
By the late 1980s, Orlando Bosch also was out of Venezuela's jails and back in Miami. But Bosch, who had been implicated in about 30 violent attacks, was facing possible deportation by U.S. officials who warned that Washington couldn't credibly lecture other countries about terrorism while protecting a terrorist like Bosch.
But Bosch got lucky. Jeb Bush, then an aspiring Florida politician, led a lobbying drive to prevent the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from expelling Bosch. In 1990, the lobbying paid dividends when Jeb's dad, President George H.W. Bush, blocked proceedings against Bosch, letting the unapologetic terrorist stay in the United States.
In 1992, also during George H.W. Bush's presidency, the FBI interviewed Posada about the Iran-Contra scandal for 6 1/2 hours at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras.
Posada filled in some blanks about the role of Bush's vice presidential office in the secret contra operation. According to a 31-page summary of the FBI interview, Posada said Bush's national security adviser, Donald Gregg, was in frequent contact with Felix Rodriguez.
"Posada ... recalls that Rodriguez was always calling Gregg," the FBI summary said. "Posada knows this because he's the one who paid Rodriguez' phone bill." After the interview, the FBI agents let Posada walk out of the embassy to freedom. [For details, see Parry's Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth.]
More Attacks
Posada soon returned to his anti-Castro plotting.
In 1994, Posada set out to kill Castro during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia. Posada and five cohorts reached Cartagena, but the plan flopped when security cordons prevented the would-be assassins from getting a clean shot at Castro, according to a Miami Herald account. [Miami Herald, June 7, 1998]
The Herald also described Posada's role in a lethal 1997 bombing campaign against popular hotels and restaurants inside Cuba that killed an Italian tourist. The story cited documentary evidence that Posada arranged payments to conspirators from accounts in the United States.
Posada landed back in jail in 2000 after Cuban intelligence uncovered a plot to assassinate Castro by planting a bomb at a meeting the Cuban leader planned with university students in Panama.
Panamanian authorities arrested Posada and other alleged co-conspirators in November 2000. In April 2004, they were sentenced to eight or nine years in prison for endangering public safety.
Four months after the sentencing, however, lame-duck Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso -- who lives in Key Biscayne, Florida, and has close ties to the Cuban-American community and to George W. Bush's administration -- pardoned the convicts.
Despite press reports saying Moscoso had been in contact with U.S. officials about the pardons, the State Department denied that it pressured Moscoso to release the Cuban exiles. After the pardons and just two months before Election 2004, three of Posada's co-conspirators -- Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez -- arrived in Miami to a hero's welcome, flashing victory signs at their supporters.
While the terrorists celebrated, U.S. authorities watched the men -- also implicated in bombings in New York, New Jersey and Florida -- alight on U.S. soil. As Washington Post writer Marcela Sanchez noted in a September 2004 article about the Panamanian pardons, "there is something terribly wrong when the United States, after Sept. 11 (2001), fails to condemn the pardoning of terrorists and instead allows them to walk free on U.S. streets." [Washington Post, Sept. 3, 2004]
But a whole different set of standards is now being applied to the seven black terrorism suspects in Miami. Even though they had no clear-cut plans or even the tools to carry out terrorist attacks, they have been rounded up amid great media hoopla.
The American people have been reassured that the terrorists in Miami have been located and are being brought to justice.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Copyright 2006 The Consortium for Independent Journalism
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A former Internet expert for the FCC reveals how the National Security Agency most likely conducted its top-secret spying
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SALON
News & Politics
June 23, 2006
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/23/internet_expert/
By Kim Zetter
A federal court in California released a previously sealed 40-page document on Thursday in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T, which bolsters allegations that the telecommunications giant built secret rooms to allow the National Security Agency to conduct widespread surveillance of Internet traffic. The document also paints a detailed scenario of how the NSA may be conducting the top-secret operation, which closely matches information given to Salon by a former AT&T employee who worked at the company's network operations center in Bridgeton, Mo.
The document, a statement by J. Scott Marcus, a former senior advisor for Internet technology to the Federal Communications Commission, was filed under seal on April 5 on behalf of the EFF to support its class-action suit against AT&T, which alleges that the company violated a number of federal laws in aiding the government's domestic spying operation against AT&T customers. The court sealed the document because it contained proprietary AT&T information, then ordered AT&T and EFF to work together to produce a redacted version to place in the public record, which they did on Thursday.
EFF asked Marcus to examine records from a former AT&T technician in California named Mark Klein that describe how AT&T reconfigured its network in San Francisco and installed special computer systems in a secret room, allegedly to divert and collect Internet traffic to help the NSA conduct warrantless surveillance. Were the records authentic and was it feasible that they described a government surveillance program, or could the reconfiguration and systems have been put in place for more innocuous uses?
Marcus concludes in his statement that the documents are authentic and, after considering a number of possible reasons for the reconfiguration -- such as legitimate network monitoring and maintenance -- writes that the system AT&T installed in a secret San Francisco room, and likely other cities, was "exceptionally well suited to a massive, distributed surveillance activity" and that "no other application provides as good an explanation for the combination of engineering choices that were made."
He considered that the system might be set up to accommodate lawful traffic intercepts under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, but deemed this not a credible scenario, since there are far simpler and less expensive solutions for meeting CALEA, which required Internet service providers to make their networks wiretap-ready. He also concludes that given how cash strapped AT&T was in 2002 and 2003 when the expensive changes and additions to the system were made, it is "exceedingly unlikely" that AT&T financed the project on its own. "I therefore conclude that it is highly probable that funding came from an outside source, and consider the U.S. Government to be the most likely source," he writes in the document.
Over several pages that are redacted at key points, Marcus discusses technical details in the Klein documents that have previously been unavailable. (The Klein documents are under seal, and although some of them have made it to the Internet, others, judging by details revealed by Marcus, have never been made public.) According to Marcus, the Klein documents refer to a "private ... backbone network, which appears to partition from AT&T's main Internet backbone." This suggests the presence of a private network, Marcus writes, whose existence is "not consistent with normal AT&T practice."
"The most plausible inference is that this was a covert network that was used to ship data of interest to one or more central locations for still more intensive analysis," Marcus writes.
The most interesting aspect of the Marcus statement is the clear, though speculative, scenario he provides for how the National Security Agency is likely conducting its surveillance and data collection through that network. Marcus, currently a consultant with WIK-Consult GmbH in Bad Honnef, Germany, was unavailable for comment. But in the statement, he suggests that the secret San Francisco room is connected to two separate networks -- the regular commercial network on which e-mail, Web surfing and voice-over Internet Protocol traffic runs, and the second private, covert network that is partitioned off from the regular network and is used to divert traffic that has been copied and sent back to a central collection place. He suggests that massive amounts of data are collected at 15 to 20 locations around the country, where it is automatically screened and winnowed down to only "data of interest" by a special system installed in San Francisco (and likely elsewhere) before it is shipped off to one or two central collection points, where it is processed by powerful computers and analyzed by skilled staff.
This agrees with what several sources told Salon this week. A former AT&T network technician who is well acquainted with AT&T's common backbone and asked to remain anonymous, told Salon about a secret, heavily secured room located in AT&T's Bridgeton facility, where the company runs its technical command center from which it manages all of its backbone. From that facility, the company could send commands to any of its 1,500 to 2,000 routers around the country to filter and divert traffic from those locations. To do that, the technician said, AT&T would need to physically place network "sniffers" at key points in the company's backbone. "There are 10 or 15 data centers located in major cities around the country," he said. "So they would need to stick [a sniffer] in each of those data centers to capture all the information." Then the company could easily send commands from the Bridgeton room to the routers in those locations. The commands would indicate what data to collect and where to divert it afterward.
Marcus writes that although the configuration in San Francisco was deployed in early 2003, given AT&T processes, the planning for it was probably underway six to 12 months earlier. This coincides with the timing of the Bridgeton Network Operation Center, which was put in place about eight months before the San Francisco room was configured and was the place from which the work order for the secret room in San Francisco originated.
The Bridgeton room, guarded with a high-tech mantrap with retinal and fingerprint scanners, is restricted to government workers and AT&T employees with top-secret security clearances and is likely just used for remotely monitoring and maintaining the secret rooms around the country and sending commands. Russ Tice, a former NSA officer and senior analyst until last year, told Salon that the data once collected is probably not sent to Bridgeton but instead is diverted to an NSA facility where powerful processing equipment can analyze it.
As for the kind of data collected, Marcus infers from the Klein documents that the configuration in place in San Francisco would enable surveillance of "both overseas and purely domestic traffic." But the Klein evidence suggests that only "off net" traffic was being collected in San Francisco at the time the documents were written. "Off net" refers to traffic sent between AT&T customers and customers of other ISPs; "on net" traffic is sent strictly between one AT&T customer and another AT&T customer.
Still, this amounts to a lot of data, Marcus says. It would mean that any traffic that passed through AT&T's network from another ISP or network would be intercepted. He suggests the possibility, however, that authorities could conceivably weed out domestic traffic to collect only international traffic exchanged between an AT&T customer and noncustomer, given that software programs exist that can help distinguish domestic Internet traffic from traffic that travels from outside the United States. But he writes that even with such weeding, some purely domestic traffic would likely slip through the filter.
A hearing on the EFF lawsuit against AT&T is being held in San Francisco Friday to determine whether the case should be thrown out. The Department of Justice has interfered in the case, calling on the court to dismiss it on grounds that national security secrets would be exposed if a trial were to proceed.
Kim Zetter is an investigative reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Copyright 2006 Salon Media Group, Inc.
*****
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4. FAA STONEWALLS RELEASE OF 'COCAINE ONE' RECORDS
Homeland Security Inc. Scandal Off and Running
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THE MAD COW MORNING NEWS
World Exclusive
June 22, 2006
http://www.madcowprod.com/06222006.html
By Daniel Hopsicker
Venice, FL--Less than two weeks before the company declared bankruptcy which owned the DC9 recently busted in Mexico with 5.5 tons of cocaine onboard, Florida Governor Jeb Bush's Department of Transportation issued a press release touting the firm's bright future in Homeland Security and announcing it had been selected to be the state's primary provider of airport security applications.
This is not the first time Jeb Bush has been involved endorsing a drug trafficking aviation company. Nor is it the first time SkyWay Aircraft has been the recipient of unexplained government favoritism.
The Federal Aviation Administration, for example, has been doing SkyWay a major solid...
Two months and eleven days after the firm's American-registered DC9 was caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Campeche, Mexico destined for distribution in the U.S., the FAA is still stonewalling requests for the release of what are--by statue--public records of the registration and ownership of the plane.
In a twisted perversion of the U.S. Government's so-called War on Drugs, the FAA is "Just Saying No" to the American people, who are not allowed to know if an American Drug Lord may have been responsible for the last doomed flight of "Cocaine One."
We're not cleared for that information.
Be a Citizen Journalist! Win big prizes! Pressure the FAA
We first became interested in the story of the orphan 5.5 tons of coke after learning that Cocaine One's registered owner, "Royal Sons LLC," had once been housed in a hanger owned by terror flight school Huffman Aviation at the Venice, Fl Airport.
That's a real unlucky little airport, we thought to ourselves. Maybe they should shut it down before something really bad happens.
Compounding the seriousness of FAA malfeasance is that the DC9 airliner had been apprehended while painted to resemble an aircraft from the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security. That makes the FAA's refusal to release the plane's records a matter of urgent national security.
Today the MadCowMorningNews is issuing an urgent appeal to readers and all Americans who believe in real moral values, like democracy and government accountability, to demand the FAA immediately release the registration records of the DC9 (N900SA) in question.
Take a moment to help put some pressure on the FAA. If you're someone interested in making our Government answer, if only occasionally, to the governed, click here, http://www.madcowprod.com/FAAPLEEEEASE.htm.
Help us send the FAA a message.
The Homeland Security Inc. Scandal
The current unpleasantness combines a witch's brew of elements from the Iran Contra scandal--CIA-led cocaine trafficking in "support" of, well, let's see: Oliver North, Adnan Khashoggi, and, oh yes, the Contras--mixed with the massive corruption and insider-led looting of the Savings & Loan Scandal which eventually cost American taxpayers over a half trillion dollars.
The burgeoning industry which has rapidly grown up under the rubric of "Homeland Security" is not only running roughshod over American concepts of equal justice under law while simultaneously looting the American Treasury for billions and billions of dollars, which we will all ultimately pay for with crippling inflation, just like the double-digit inflation at the end of the Vietnam War...
It is also bankrupting--to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars--public companies whose bankruptcies have heretofore been viewed merely as isolated events.
Experienced and respected aviation executives cited in "Welcome to TERRORLAND" stated they had witnessed the FAA protecting--both before and after the 9.11 attack--corrupt aviation companies in Florida which played host to Mohamed Atta and the other terrorist hijackers. So the current FAA stonewall should not be viewed as an isolated instance, but part of a pattern of deliberate acts.
We became curious about the huge size of the Mexican haul, 5.5 tons, and where it stood in the Big Busts of History. And what we found is either a statistical anomaly or a brand new unit of measurement like the English yard, in a system of weights and measures to which ordinary mortals are not privy.
There have been sixteen separate seizures of precisely 5.5 tons of cocaine in the past 20 years, we discovered. You can count them. We did.
Who knows? Maybe 5.5 tons is like an Eight-Ball to the Gods.
Saudis, Ultra-Zionists...and Jeb Bush
Why is the FAA keeping the American people in the dark about the names of individuals or companies trafficking tons of cocaine under the protective cloak of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security?
Perhaps it is because SkyWay is owned by an international assortment of spooks, Saudis (like the long-time lieutenant of Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi) and a number of other "connected" individuals.
And... SkyWay was founded by a Miami lawyer who is also the U.S. President of a banned Israeli ultra-nationalist political party.
And...SkyWay has provided material assistance to Florida Republicans associated with Jeb Bush, for example, like current Florida Senator Mel Martinez, who barnstormed around Florida during his run for office in a plane provided--gratis, natch--by SkyWay Aircraft.
Just who are the guilty? How are they doing it? How can they be spotted?
Let's take a look.
"The 28th Parallel is where the real money is"
While we won't be able to finger with any certainty those responsible until the FAA releases the public records they have so far been concealing, it is possible to learn by observing the the pond these fish are swimming in...
For example, it is remarkable how those involved in the 5 tons-of-coke saga share similar characteristics with players involved with Bagman Jack Abramoff.
People working for seemingly disparate entities in seemingly disparate industries seem to somehow be working out of the same dog-eared playbook, for example, their faces all seem to wear the same smirk.
They're fraudsters. But fraudsters with a difference: fraudsters with immunity... which Abramoff himself possessed, in spades, until the stench wafted all the way to Heaven, a very long ways indeed.
Abramoff may be going to jail, but although he was the chief beneficiary, it doesn't appear at all likely that he will face trial for the capital crime of murdering Gus Boulis. Jack Abramoff is proof that "Being connected means never having to say you're sorry."
Speaking of smirks...Remember the in-your-face ridiculous stated purpose of Bagman Jack's phony foundation, an "international think tank" whose stated goal, according to their literature, was "enhancing the methods of empowerment in possession of and within the United States?"
The description of the foundation's purpose proudly made not the slightest bit of sense... or attempt to seem plausible. That kind of arrogance comes with immunity.
No wonder these guys all wear a permanent smirk.
Like SkyWay, Glen Kovar's earlier "business venture" went bankrupt as well, drat the luck... Satellite Access Systems had something vaguely to do with satellites, at least according to an interview with Kovar in The Tampa Business Review headlined "Satellite firm scans universe of new markets."
"Some men follow their dreams," it began. "Glenn Kovar chased the 28th parallel. Which is primarily why several weeks ago the 64-year-old president of Satellite Access Systems moved his company from Pasadena, Calif., to St. Petersburg. Fl."
Electronic lifeblood from Nigerian Scamsters
The Long Island native explained why his offices sit atop the 16-story Plaza Towers, near the St. Petersburg Pier:
"Of the umpteen imaginary lines encircling the globe, the northern hemisphere's 28th happens to be among the most popular parallels for high-flying communications satellites, SAS' electronic lifeblood," said Kovar.
"And if you look at a globe, there aren't that many cities in the world on the 28th parallel that are nice to live in. St. Petersburg is."
We know a man who used to design satellites for Hughes, the world's leader in satellite technology. We read him the quote.
"Its utter horseshit," he told us bluntly. "The man obviously doesn't know the first thing about satellites."
Well, now. Competency has never been a requirement for getting ahead in corrupt cultures, has it?
While SkyWay was running out of money, its executive cadre was busy cashing out. The heavy lifting involved nothing more serious than issuing increasingly rosy press releases. In late December 2004, SkyWay announced a new $24 million dollar loan from Lantax, Ltd, described as "a Private Investment Group consisting of four Western European and Northern African families."
A representative of Lantax, Dr. Thabo Stephens, waxed enthusiastic. "We are confident in the technology and the business plan presented by Messieurs Kovar and Hansen. With anticipated organizational changes and the proposed funding presented by us, we believe that SkyWay will meet its business objectives. We will stand behind SkyWay Communications, with additional funding if necessary, as they enter the security and in-flight broadband communication sector."
Worried investors must have breathes a sigh of relief. Nobody goes belly up right after getting a $24 million dollar loan, right?
That Bush boy is a chip off the 'ol block
Alas... "Dr. Thabo Stephens" isn't a Doctor, and he probably doesn't know how many zeroes go after 24 when you're lending out $24 million. He's a Nigerian fraudster, one of those people who send emails addressing you as "Esteemed Sir" while asking for assistance in the delicate matter of getting money out of Nigeria, or, um, expatriating funds... grown too large, you see, to store comfortably anymore, even at the country estate...
Don't people go to jail for fraud anymore?
Apparently not, because less than a month later the Manager of Aviation Systems and Support for Jeb Bush's Florida Department of Transportation issued a press release praising the "esteemed Sirs" at SkyWay, stating, "This is a great accomplishment for the FDOT's Aviation Test Center. The FDOT wants to make Florida's airports safe and secure with the use of the latest technology available. We are looking forward to working with SkyWay."
Two weeks after this ringing public endorsement SkyWay's biggest stockholders sued the firm's management for fraud. Bankruptcy was just around the corner. And while this might look like a mid-level government bureaucrat's executive boner having nothing whatever to do with Governor Bush, that's sadly not the case. The Florida Governor himself had provided a celebrity endorsement to terror flight school owner Wally Hilliard's operation well after the company's Lear (N351WB) had been busted by DEA agents armed with machine guns, who, during the same month Atta arrive at his school, found 43 pounds of heroin onboard.
Slim to none. And Slim left town
What are the odds that a harried state government is going to unknowingly heap praise and pass out state contracts to two aviation companies serving as fronts for drug trafficking?
Hilliard's air charter service was even being utilized at virtually no cost--despite the fact that rentals for Lear jets can run as high as $1,800 an hour--by Florida Governor Jeb Bush... at the same time their planes were flying back and forth from Venezuela loaded with smack...
Isn't that whack? A sitting Governor would seem well-advised to steer clear of heroin trafficking front companies that also train terrorist, no?
Yet Governor Jeb Bush honored Hilliard's operation--called at various times Florida Air, Sunrise Airlines and Discover Air--with a personal visit, even posing for photos with the "Discover Air family."
Here's a question that needs to be asked:
What did Jeb know, and when did he know about it?
The Genesis of the hidden hand of history
The motley assortment of international players are involved in the caper in one capacity or another. While they appear on the surface to have little in common, we have discovered hidden connections, some going back years, which remain unexplained.
We'll cite just one of a number of examples:
As described in a previous story, the "Cocaine One" DC9 had a twin, whose records we have been able to pry out of the hands of the FAA. And we retailed the long list of CIA front companies which owned the this plane before SkyWay, including the owner just before SkyWay, Adnan Khashoggi lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi.
This association is no accident. SkyWay founder Farkas is a major investor in one of El-Batrawi's other front companies, Genesis Realty.
SkyWay Aircraft was a phony company which lost $40 million of shareholders money before going bankrupt. But that was okay: the company's reason for being wasn't to enhance the well-being of stockholders.
They never even bothered to develop a product.
What really hit the Pentagon? Maybe Mars & Venus snake oil
SkyWay's purpose was providing an excuse for twin DC9's to sit on a runway in St. Petersburg, FL, painted to impersonate official U.S. Government planes.
A few of the names we'll be hearing more about include:
Saudi billionaire and long-time CIA asset Adnan Khashoggi, who first emerged in the 1970s as a middleman for U.S. defense contractors looking to do business with Saudi Arabia, and then later helped arrange the sale of U.S. arms to Iran to fund the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua. He's currently wanted by Thailand on suspicion of embezzling $64 million from a failed bank in 1996.
And Khashoggi's henchman Ramy El-Batrawi, currently under indictment with Big K for looting over $120 million from a bankrupt company called GenesisIntermedia, the company that owns the marketing rights to the creative output of Mars & Venus snake oil salesman John Gray.
In what must be the Mother of All Coincidences, Gray is also the man who funded the disinformation campaign calling itself the 9.11 Truth movement.
Imagine that.
And Michael Farkas, a Miami attorney who founded and was a major stockholder of SkyWay Communications Holding Company, the last registered owner of the Cocaine One DC9, and serves double duty as the American representative of an ultra-nationalist Zionist [Kach] party in Israel, and a sales agent for anti-missile technology developed by Israel Aircraft Industries' for the Israeli Defense Force.
And we mustn't forget Al Ali Al Sabah, Chief of the National Guard of Kuwait as well as the oldest member of the ruling Kuwaiti Royal Family, one of the dozen Saudi and Kuwaiti "investors" in SkyWay brought to the deal by Nazar Talib, a native of Baghdad, Iraq who is today a securities trader in Arkansas.
Finally, we'll also take a light-hearted look at what the owners of SkyWay are doing today. Sweating out indictments, perhaps?
Hardly. They appear to be waist deep in their next big score. SkyWay President Bernie Kovar's old business card, above (see web page).
That's--Mon Dieu!--his new business card, just below it, from his new company. [Department of Homeland Security]
La plus ca change!
There used to be a saying: "Crime doesn't pay."
You don't hear it much anymore, though.
Now Available! Welcome to Terrorland: Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-up in Florida, by Daniel Hopsicker, madcow@gmail.com. The two-year long investigation into Mohamed Atta & his contacts and associates in Florida. English and German editions. Order a signed copy now; $29.95: http://MadCowProd.com.
Copyright 2006 Daniel Hopsicker
*****
MEDIA TRANSPARENCY
'The Money Behind Conservative Media'
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- Friday, June 23, 2006 -
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5. THE SELLING OF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY
Larry Ross' A. Larry Ross Communications
brings Christian marketing into the 21st century
_________________________________________________________________________
Original Research
http://www.mediatransparency.com/story.php?storyID=133
by Bill Berkowitz
"Moses stood there on top of a cliff, and as long as he held up his arms, the children of Israel won. Well, after a while he got tired, so there were two men that came and held up Moses' arms so they could win the battle. That's my job--to hold up the arms of the man of God, like Billy Graham or Rick Warren, in the media." -- Larry Ross, New York Times Magazine, April 16, 2006
You've probably never heard of him or his public relations company, but you've certainly heard of many of his clients. Over the years, he has represented such heavy hitters as the Rev. Billy Graham, Pastor Rick Warren of Lake Forest, California's Saddleback Church, Texas's African American MegaChurch Pastor T.D. Jakes, and the up-and-coming Ohio Pastor, Rod Parsley, the head of Ohio's Center for Moral Clarity.
He has worked with the Promise Keepers, the international men's ministry, as well as such movies as "Left Behind," a film based on the popular series of apocalyptic novels of the same name, "The Prince of Egypt," and actor/director Mel Gibson's blockbuster, "The Passion of the Christ."
He is Larry Ross and he heads up the Dallas, Texas-based A. Larry Ross Communications. For more than 25 years, Ross has been marketing conservative evangelical Christianity.
"In 1981," the New York Times reported, "Ross began working with the evangelist Billy Graham and trailblazing the new world of Christian P.R." After a tape of anti-Semitic remarks Graham had made to then President Richard Nixon became public, Ross "counseled Graham through the...crisis."
Ross also made sure that Graham's name never surfaced during the assorted televangelism scandals of the 1980s that involved Jim Bakker and his wife Tammie Faye, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, and other lesser-known preachers.
Ross is still working with Graham: In early April, when the Reverend's book, "The Journey," made the New York Times extended best-seller list, "Ross could be heard pitching him as the oldest author ever on the list."
The twenty-first century is a golden age for Christian-based entertainment: "The Passion of the Christ," which took in over $370 million at the box office, "The Chronicles of Narnia," which took in more than $290 million domestically last winter, and Tim LaHaye's "Left Behind" books, which have sold more than 50 million copies, are the most tangible examples of evangelical blockbusters.
In addition, according to the New York Times, "Christian music now racks up $700 million in sales annually. In 2004, sales of religious books reached $1.9 billion. Packaged Facts, a market-research firm, predicted that Christian products will generate $9.5 billion in sales by 2010."
And now, there are Christian-oriented video games: In early May, at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, "Left Behind: Eternal Forces," made its video game debut. The game "features plenty of biblical smiting, albeit with high-tech weaponry as players battle the forces of the Antichrist in a smoldering world approaching Armageddon," the Los Angeles Times reported. The game is based on the best selling series of apocalyptic novels of the same name, written by Jerry Jenkins, and conceived of the Rev. Tim LaHaye, a longtime Religious right leader.
"'Left Behind' has the Antichrist, the end of the world, the apocalypse," said co-creator Jeffrey S. Frichner. "It's got all the Christian stuff, and it's still got all the cool stuff."
"The reason that I think this game has a chance is that it's not particularly preachy," said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities. "I will say some of the dialogue is pretty lame -- people saying, 'Praise the Lord' after they blow away the bad guys. I think they're overdoing it a bit. But the message is OK."
"We hope teenagers like the game," LaHaye commented. "Our real goal is to have no one left behind."
"There's an audience here," Larry Ross told the Los Angeles Times. "In addition to the youth audience -- that's the primary target -- there are parents who are concerned about what their children are exposed to and are encouraged by products that are biblically based," Ross said. "I would assume, if there is violence, it's the cosmic struggle of good versus evil, not gratuitous violence."
Founded to give the 'Christian message' a fair hearing in the 'mainstream media'
According to its website, A. Larry Ross Communications "is a full-service media and public relations agency founded in 1994 to 'restore faith in media,' provide 'value-added P.R. that defines values' and give Christian messages relevance and meaning in mainstream media.
"ALRC assists Christian-focused organizations, associations, ministries and churches in telling their stories through the Christian and secular media in the context of traditional news values.
"For more than a decade, ALRC has remained the nation's most-respected firm in Christian-focused communications. The Agency operates at the intersection of faith and culture, specializing in crossover communications projects and processes emanating from or targeted to the Christian market -- both Protestant and Catholic."
While Christian-based PR firms aren't new phenomena, Ross's group is among the few that are rising to the top in a very crowded field. Mark DeMoss, who worked with the Rev. Jerry Falwell for eight years before starting the DeMoss Group in Atlanta in 1991, also "enjoys comparable status," the New York Times noted.
And while the groups, campaigns and individuals represented by Ross' client list are prestigious, it is "the Kingdom of God itself [that] is a client of sorts," the New York Times pointed out. "Publicity, marketing and branding are his ministry. So the real question becomes, Why does God need someone to sell him?"
With the culture wars cutting a mighty swath through Hollywood these days, Ross is picking up a number of clients. Paul Lauer's Motive Entertainment, which "orchestrated the marketing" of "The Passion," enlisted 15 firms, including Ross's, to handle different tasks. Jonathan Bock's Grace Hill Media worked on developing the marketing strategy for "Narnia," and "other marketing firms include[ing] the Internet-focused BuzzPlant, based in Tennessee, and Renegade Idea Group, out of Texas.
According to the New York Times, Ross "claims that in the past decade smaller firms have emerged that handle Christian P.R., which he differentiates from marketing (his firm handles both)... [he also] works with many of them and acts as a sort of Vernon Jordan of the Bible Belt, making introductions and forging strategic alliances."
After working for 13-years at Walter Bennett Communications, where he first began working with Billy Graham, in 1994, Ross, and his wife Autumn, took what she characterized as a "bungee jump for God," and opened up its Dallas-based firm.
The company currently has 13 staff members and carries somewhere close to 20 to 30 clients at any given time. "Ross says that he rarely chases after a client and is able to operate on the principle of attraction, relying on good word of mouth and referrals to win clients," the New York Times pointed out. "Ross, quoting Autumn, characterizes his clients as 'anybody that we will be with in heaven someday.' While he declines to be specific, he does admit to annual billings 'in the seven figures.'"
During the past few years, Ross, whose "religion is conspicuously central to his work and life," has had an impressive run: When the story of Ashley Smith -- the Atlanta woman who had her 15 minutes of fame after reading passages from Rick Warren's "The Purpose-Driven Life" to her captor, an escaped murder suspect named Brian Nichols -- began to go south when it was revealed that Smith had also given Nichols crystal meth, "Ross helped Warren respond to this mainstream reaction by emphasizing their story, which, in the words of David Chrzan, Rick Warren's chief of staff was that "God can use anybody. Here, God used a tweaked-out speed freak to get a guy to realize he'd done something wrong and turn himself in."
Ross has successfully mainstreamed the image of Bishop T.D. Jakes, the pastor of the Potter's House in South Dallas, one of the fastest-growing churches in the country, who is also behind the "Woman, Thou Art Loosed" novel, film and gatherings, and who created the Metroplex Economic Development Corporation, which sponsors homeownership conferences and organizes training sessions for would-be entrepreneurs.
"After listening to hours and hours" of Jakes' sermons, "Ross realized that what might appeal to a broader audience were Jakes' efforts to economically empower African-American youth -- Jakes was a business story, in other words, the New York Times reported. "Not long after that, Jakes landed a Page 1 profile in the Wall Street Journal. It was the preacher's first major national exposure."
Somehow, Ross is able to square his rationalizing of anti-semitic statements expressed by the Rev. Billy Graham's in his White House conversation with Richard Nixon, and being able to stay on message after the Ashley Smith kidnapping story broke down, with his deeply held religious beliefs. Although the New York Times pointed out that he "takes pains to distance himself from the more unsavory associations with publicists," it appears that he has mastered the art of all public relations professionals: crank out a good yarn for your clients, keep your clients out of harm's way from the media, apologize only when absolutely necessary and then, change the conversation.
Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement and a frequent writer for Media Transparency. He documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.
Copyright 2006 Media Transparency
*****
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_________________________________________________________________________
THE MOSCOW TIMES
Global Eye
June 23, 2006
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/168832/
By Chris Floyd
This week an interesting story appeared in The Washington Post -- buried on page 16, of course, lest anyone think it was of the slightest importance. It revealed that documentary proof has now emerged confirming the fact that in the spring of 2003, the regime of President George W. Bush -- flush with its illusory "victory" in Iraq -- spurned a wide-ranging peace feeler from Iran that offered "full cooperation" on every issue that the Bushists claim to be concerned about in regard to Tehran: "nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups."
In other words, everything that Bush says he wants from the Iranians now, he could have had for the asking -- three years ago. What then can we conclude from the rejection of this extraordinary initiative? The answer is obvious: The Bush faction is not really interested in curbing nuclear proliferation or defusing the powder keg of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the regional and global terror that it spawns.
What are they interested in? This answer too is obvious, to anyone who's been paying the slightest attention to the faction's words and actions over the years: They are interested in loot and dominion. What they want from Iran is nothing less than its return to quasi-colonial control by the crony conquistadors of the West. And they're willing to play a (reasonably) long game to get it.
In the meantime, it serves their interests well for the entire Middle East to seethe and boil. War and rumors of war are engines of limitless profits for the crony-cons. It sends oil prices sky-high and keeps those pork-laden contracts for weapons and "military servicing" rolling in. And the terrorism that thrives in this deliberately created chaos is another massive money-maker, as vast armies of "security consultants" ply their political connections to gobble up tons of insider grease. Bush-regime minions have led the way in this alchemical transmutation of fear into gold: More than 90 officials from the Department of Homeland Security have stampeded through the revolving door from government service to lucrative private posts, with companies seeking -- and getting -- fat deals from, er, the Department of Homeland Security, The New York Times reports.
Billions of dollars are being generated for the fortunate few by war and terror; why kill the golden goose of chaos by pursuing Middle East peace? Far better to keep the madness churning until you see a chance to grab complete control, as in Iraq; then you can start squeezing your conquest dry. And if it doesn't work out, if it all blows up, who cares? You're just back to the same old profitable chaos, biding your time, banking your wad -- and squeezing your own country dry -- until the next go-round. It's the ultimate win-win scenario.
The only losers are the rest of us -- but above all, the populations of the Middle East. It's an indisputable fact, confirmed every day, by every policy decision made in Washington, that the Bush faction doesn't give a damn about the ordinary people in that tormented region -- not even the Israelis. It doesn't care about their freedom, their security, their children; it doesn't care if they live or die; it only cares about their exploitable resources and their geopolitical usefulness to the faction's openly stated desire for "full-spectrum dominance" over the political and economic life of the globe. There is no other conclusion to be drawn from the Bushists' actual record -- what they actually do, what they actually support and what they actually ignore -- once you strip away their cynical, ever-shifting rhetoric.
If Bush really wanted peace in the Middle East, he would have pursued Iran's unprecedented offer of "full cooperation" in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. If Bush really wanted to eliminate the danger of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, he would have seized on Tehran's offer of "full cooperation" to do so. It's as simple as that. But he chose not to take up the offers. These goals are not priorities for him. His interests lie elsewhere.
By the way, Saddam made a very similar offer just before the invasion, as The New York Times reported in 2003: acquiescence to any U.S. initiative on Israel-Palestine, full cooperation on WMD inspections, even internationally supervised elections, which would have almost certainly ousted him from power. Everything that Bush claimed he went to war for in Iraq -- disarmament, regime change, reducing Middle East tensions, democracy for the Iraqi people -- he could have had, for the asking, without war.
But the Bushist crony-cons wanted war in Iraq, come hell or high water -- or even Saddam's surrender. Again, this is not supposition, it's a fact. As we've often reported here, in September 2000 a "think tank" led by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld published a report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," stating that the imposition of a U.S. military presence in Iraq was a strategic imperative "transcending the regime of Saddam Hussein." In this same report, the Cheney-Rumsfeld group also acknowledged that it would take a "new Pearl Harbor" to "catalyze" the American people into readily accepting their radical plans for military expansion abroad and vast new "defense" spending at home. Not only can these wizards turn fear into gold; they can apparently see into the future as well.
Now that same crystal ball shows them the wealth of Persia falling like ripe fruit into their hands. They may feign diplomacy for the moment, biding their time, profiting from chaos -- but as in Iraq, no offer of peace will deter them from the inevitable smash-and-grab.
Copyright 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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- AFIB No. 732, June 21, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
In retrospect, 9-11, "as advertised" by the Bush administration, was not what it at first seemed. The Al Qaeda terrorists were intimately tied to American allies in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Israel. Those three countries benefited directly from the aftermath of 9-11, and all three were involved in activities that were linked directly to the terrorist attacks on the United States. 9-11 was a panacea for those countries. No longer did the United States put pressure on Riyadh and Islamabad to curb human rights abuses and nuclear proliferation--they were in the vanguard of America's so-called Global War on Terrorism. Israel had a virtual carte blanche to carry out, to the applause of both Republican and Democratic leaders in the United States, whatever policies it saw fit. -- Wayne Madsen, Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops, & Big Oil [Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2006] p. 285.
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ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 734/June 28, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 733/June 25, 2006
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- Wednesday, 21 June 2006 -
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1. WASHINGTON ESCALATES SLAUGHTER IN IRAQ
_________________________________________________________________________
News & Analysis: Middle East: Iraq
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/iraq-j21.shtml
By Bill Van Auken
The killing of two American soldiers captured by insurgents at a roadblock south of Baghdad will be seized upon by Washington as justification for an intensified bloodbath against the Iraqi people.
Well before the discovery of the bodies of the young soldiers, reportedly bearing the marks of torture and mutilation, there were already mounting indications that the Bush White House and the Pentagon were implementing a shift in military tactics that spells a dramatic escalation of US violence in the occupied country.
The mass media, which has shown little inclination to highlight the daily death toll of American troops, now totaling over 2,500--much less the far greater toll of Iraqi dead, estimated in the hundreds of thousands--has exhibited keen interest in the fate of the two executed enlisted men, including gruesome details of their deaths. Their aim is to whip up an atmosphere of hatred and revenge against the Iraqi population.
Brutal killings of occupation troops are the inevitable product of every colonial war fought in the history of mankind. Yet virtually every US television announcer and every newspaper headline writer has felt a duty to proclaim the "barbaric" and "savage" character of these particular deaths, words that are never applied to the torture deaths of Iraqis in the confines of Abu Ghraib and other US detention centers, the slaughter of men, women and children in their own homes by 500-pound bombs, or the indiscriminate killing of civilians on Iraqi roads in the name of "force protection."
The media has granted instant credibility to an Internet posting which claims that the purported new leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq--Abu Hamza al-Muhajir--personally beheaded the American soldiers. This dubious claim is promoted to provide a personification of evil for mass consumption, with the aim of conditioning the American people for the mass killing that is about to be carried out in their name.
Government and media propaganda aside, these killings are a telling indication that more than three years after invading and occupying Iraq, US forces have failed to secure the very ground upon which they stand. The ability of masked gunmen to seize the soldiers, hold them for three days, kill them and dump their bodies, and then mine both the location of the corpses and the road leading to it, without being captured or detected by the thousands of troops searching for them, is evidence that those fighting the US occupation enjoy widespread support and sympathy from within the Iraqi population.
It should be recalled that the bloodbath unleashed upon Fallujah in November 2004 followed the killing and mutilation of four military contractors--hired mercenaries--who were ambushed while driving through the Iraqi city. The city was turned into a free-fire zone and much of it was reduced to rubble by means of high explosive bombs, complimented by napalm and chemical weapons.
Similar atrocities are being prepared against the capital of Anbar Province, Ramadi, which has been placed under US military siege. Warplanes and attack helicopters fly continuously over the city, dropping bombs, while battle tanks patrol the streets. A series of roadblocks have sealed off all roads in and out of Ramadi, and residents have been subjected to the cutoff of basic services such as electricity, water and emergency medical care.
An entire US Marine battalion--some 2,500 troops--has been deployed in and around the city, while an additional 1,500 US soldiers have been brought to Iraq specifically for the operation in Ramadi, long considered a center of resistance to the American occupation. Another two battalions of US-trained Iraqi government troops have been mobilized.
While many families have fled Ramadi, it is estimated that as many as 150,000 Iraqis--among them the poor, the elderly and the disabled--remain within the city, unable to leave. Once the all-out US offensive begins, these men, women and children will be classified as "terrorists" and many will be included in the reported toll of enemy forces killed in combat.
Another war crime is being prepared, even as evidence mounts that the US war and occupation of Iraq consists of countless acts of brutality and murder.
The search launched in the wake of the capture of the two US soldiers has itself been accompanied by massive violence. According to the Pentagon, the US deployed some 8,000 troops in the operation and "cleared" at least 12 villages, forcibly detaining large numbers of Iraqis.
In Baghdad itself, a security crackdown has been launched following George Bush's grandstanding visit to the Green Zone last week. Security sweeps are being conducted by combined units of US and Iraqi puppet troops, while a dusk-to-dawn curfew has been put in place. Last month, according to official Iraqi sources, some 2,155 people suffered violent deaths in the capital, many of them victims of US-trained death squads.
Another atrocity was carried out by the US military this week in a village near the city of Baquba, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. According to published reports, between 13 and 15 Iraqis were killed in an air raid and subsequent assault by US airborne troops. The dead consisted primarily of poultry farm workers, gunned down by American forces, but also included one child.
Even before the investigation into the massacre of 24 civilians in the town of Haditha has concluded, the US Army has charged three American soldiers--all members of the 101st Airborne, the unit of the two soldiers captured and executed this week--with murder in the summary execution of three Iraqis last month.
Those killed were among some 200 detained by American troops in a May 9 raid at a chemical plant near the Thar Thar canal in northern Salahuddin province. According to the Pentagon's account, not only did three soldiers participate in the executions, they threatened to kill a fourth member of their unit if he said anything about the murders.
The growing number of criminal charges against US troops are symptomatic of an occupation and war that are themselves crimes, involving unimaginable violence and deprivation inflicted on the Iraqi people.
The great bulk of atrocities are carried out with official sanction and go unreported by the American media and unopposed by the ostensible political opposition, the Democratic Party. The US public is kept almost entirely in the dark about the horrors that are being carried out in its name under the phony mantle of the "global war on terrorism."
While there is increasing evidence that the US attempt to conquer Iraq and install a puppet regime to ensure US control over the country's oil reserves has produced a debacle, there is no indication that either the Bush administration or its nominal political opponents in the Democratic Party have any intention of calling the bloodbath to a halt.
On the contrary, the preparations for an assault on Ramadi and the crackdown in Baghdad suggest that the Bush administration is planning to employ naked force and mass terror to produce at least the appearance of a changed situation on the ground in Iraq before the November mid-term elections.
While such political calculations play a major role in this military strategy, on a more fundamental level, the US ruling elite remains committed to a policy of subjugating Iraq to semi-colonial domination. The phony debate on the war in Congress and within the Democratic Party is not over whether to end the occupation, but how to make it succeed.
The so-called "antiwar" faction of the Democrats, including the party's former presidential candidate, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, is proposing not an end to the colonialist adventure in Iraq, but merely a "redeployment" to carry it out more effectively and with fewer American casualties. The predominant faction in the party, personified by New York Senator Hillary Clinton, maintains a policy of continuing the present deployment, differing little with the Bush administration.
Virtually every major newspaper, from the supposedly liberal New York Times to the hard-line Republican Wall Street Journal, has published editorials in the past week warning that demands to withdraw US troops or even to set a timetable for reducing force levels are unacceptable.
What accounts for this remarkable unanimity among those entrusted with manufacturing public opinion behind a position that is manifestly at odds with the popular antiwar sentiment reflected in every opinion poll? It reflects a broad consensus within America's financial elite that the project of conquering Iraq--whatever differences might exist over its execution by the Bush administration--must continue, no matter what the cost in human life and financial resources. The profit interests of America's multi-millionaires and billionaires are bound up with Washington's attempt to use military force to achieve global hegemony, and no amount of killing is too great to secure them.
An end to this filthy war can be achieved only through the independent political mobilization of American working people against these interests and the two-party system that exists to defend them. The Socialist Equality Party has placed at the center of its intervention in the US midterm elections the demand for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all American military forces from Iraq, and that all those responsible for the illegal and unprovoked invasion be compelled to face trial before a war crimes tribunal.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
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2. THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT EVERYDAY LIFE IN BAGHDAD
(BY THE U.S. AMBASSADOR)
_________________________________________________________________________
THE INDEPENDENT
World: Middle East
20 June 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1090904.ece
CONFIDENTIAL MEMO
FROM: US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, Baghdad
TO: Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State
SUBJECT: SNAPSHOTS FROM THE OFFICE
SENSITIVE
1. Iraqi staff in the Public Affairs sector have complained that Islamist and Militia groups have been negatively affecting daily routine. Harassment over proper dress and habits is increasingly persuasive. They also report power cuts and fuel prices have diminished their quality of life.
Women's Rights
2. Two of our three female employees report stepped up harassment beginning in mid-May. One, a Shia who favors Western clothing, was advised by an unknown woman in her Baghdad neighbourhood to wear a veil and not to drive her own car. She said some groups are pushing women to cover even their face, a step not taken in Iran even at its most conservative.
3. Another, a Sunni, said people in her neighbourhood are harassing women and telling them to cover up and stop using cell phones. She said the taxi driver who brings her every day to the green zone has told her he cannot let her ride unless she wears a headcover. A female in the PAS cultural section is now wearing a full abaya after receiving direct threats.
4. The women say they cannot identify the groups pressuring them. The cautions come from other women, sometimes from men who could be Sunni or Shia, but appear conservative. Some ministries, notably the Sadrist controlled Ministry of Transportation, have been forcing females to wear the hijab at work.
Dress Code For All?
5. Staff members have reported it is now dangerous for men to wear shorts in public; they no longer allow their children to play outside in shorts. People who wear jeans in public have come under attack.
Evictions
6. One colleague beseeched us to help a neighbor who was uprooted in May from her home of 30 years, on the pretense of application of some long-disused law. The woman, who is a Fayli Kurd, says she has nowhere to go, but the courts give them no recourse to this new assertion of power. Such uprootings may be response by new Shia government authorities to similar actions against Arabs by Kurds in other parts of Iraq. (NOTE: An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province, as political parties and their militias are seemingly engaged in tit-for-tat reprisals all over Iraq.)
Power Cuts and Fuel Shortages a Drain on Society
7. Temperatures in Baghdad have already reached 115 degrees. Employees all confirm that, by the last week of May, they were getting one hour of power for every six hours without. By early June, the situation had improved slightly. In Hal al-Shaab, power has recently improved from one in six to one in three hours. Other staff report similar variances. Central Baghdad neighborhood Bab al-Nu'atham has had no city power for over a month. Areas near hospitals, political party headquarters and the green zone have the best supply. One staff member reported a friend lives in a building that houses the new minister; within 24 hours of his appointment, her building had city power 24 hours a day.
8. All employees supplement city power with service contracted with neighborhood generator hookups that they pay for monthly. One employee pays 7500 Iraqi dinars (ID) per ampere to get 10 amperes per month (75,000 ID = $50/month). For this, her family gets eight hours of power per day, with service ending at 2am.
9. Fuel queues. One employee told us that he had spent 12 hours on his day off waiting to get gas. Another staff member confirmed that shortages were so dire, prices on the black market in much of Baghdad were now above 1,000 ID per liter (the official, subsidized price is 250 ID)
Kidnappings, and Threats of Worse
10. One employee informed us that his brother-in-law had been kidnapped. The man was eventually released but this caused enormous emotional distress to his family. One employee, a Sunni Kurd, received an indirect threat on her life in April. She took extended leave, and by May, relocated abroad with her family.
Security Forces Mistrusted
11. In April, employees began reporting a change in demeanor of guards at the green zone checkpoints. They seemed to be militia-like in some cases seemingly taunting. One employee asked us to get her some press credentials because the guards held her embassy badge up and proclaimed loudly to passers-by "Embassy" as she entered. Such information is a death sentence if heard by the wrong people.
Supervising Staff At High Risk
12. Employees all share a common tale: of nine employees in March, only four had family members who knew they worked at the embassy. Iraqi colleagues who are called after hours often speak in Arabic as an indication they cannot speak openly in English.
13. We cannot call employees in on weekends or holidays without blowing their "cover". A Sunni Arab female employee tells us family pressures and the inability to share details of her employment is very tough; she told her family she was in Jordon when we sent her on training to the US. Mounting criticism of the US at home among family members also makes her life difficult. She told us in mid-June that most of her family believes the US - which is widely perceived as fully controlling the country and tolerating the malaise - is punishing the population as Saddam did (but with Sunnis and very poor Shia now at the bottom of the list). Otherwise, she says, the allocation of power and security would not be so arbitrary.
14. Some of our staff do not take home their American cell phones, as it makes them a target. They use code names for friends and colleagues and contacts entered into Iraq cell phones. For at least six months, we have not been able to use any local staff for translation at on-camera press events.
15. We have begun shredding documents that show local staff surnames. In March, a few members approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate.
Sectarian Tensions Within Families
16. Ethnic and sectarian faultlines are becoming part of the daily media fare in the country. One Shia employee told us in late May that she can no longer watch TV news with her mother, who is Sunni, because her mother blamed all the government failings on the fact that Shia are in charge. Many of the employee's family left Iraq years ago. This month, another sister is departing for Egypt, as she imagines the future here is too bleak.
Frayed Nerves and Mistrust
17. Against this backdrop of frayed social networks, tension and moodiness have risen. A Sunni Arab female apparently insulted a Shia female by criticizing her overly liberal dress. One colleague told us he feels "defeated" by circumstances, citing the example of being unable to help his two-year-old son who has asthma and cannot sleep in the stifling heat.
18. Another employee tells us life outside the Green Zone has become " emotionally draining". He claims to attend a funeral "every evening ". He, like other local employees, is financially responsible for his immediate and extended families. He revealed that "the burden of responsibility; new stress coming from social circles who increasingly disapprove of the coalition presence, and everyday threats weigh very heavily ".
Staying Straight with Neighborhood Governments and the 'Alama'
19. Staff say they daily assess how to move safely in public. Often, if they must travel outside their neighborhoods, they adopt the clothing, language, and traits of the area. Moving inconspicuously in Sadr City requires Shia dress and a particular lingo.
20 Since Samarra, Baghdadis have honed survival skills. Vocabulary has shifted. Our staff - and our contacts - have become adept in modifying behaviour to avoid "Alasas", informants who keep an eye out for "outsiders" in neighborhoods. The Alasa mentality is becoming entrenched as Iraqi security forces fail to gain public confidence.
21. Staff report security and services are being rerouted through " local providers" whose affiliations are vague. Those who are admonishing citizens on their dress are not well known either. Personal safety depends on good relations with "neighborhood" governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. People no longer trust most neighbours.
22. A resident of Shia/Christian Karrada district told us "outsiders" have moved in and control the mukhtars.
Comment
23. Although our staff retain a professional demeanor, strains are apparent. We see their personal fears are reinforcing divisive sectarian or ethnic channels. Employees are apprehensive enough that we fear they may exaggerate developments or steer us towards news that comports with their own world view. Objectivity, civility, and logic that make for a functional workplace may falter if social pressures outside the Green Zone don't abate.
(This is an edited version of the memo)
Copyright 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
*****
TRUTHOUT
767 South San Pedro St.
Los Angeles CA, 90014
Editor, Marc Ash
Tel: 1.213.489.1971
E-mail: ma@truthout.com
- Monday, 19 June 2006 -
_________________________________________________________________________
3. "Operation Forward Together"
DEEPER INTO THE QUAGMIRE
_________________________________________________________________________
Perspective
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061906J.shtml
By Dahr Jamail
On Tuesday, June 13th, while Mr. Bush spent a brave five hours in the "green zone" of Baghdad with puppet Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, at least 36 people were killed across Iraq amidst a wave of bombings. 18 of those died in a spasm of bombings in the oil city of Kirkuk in the Kurdish north.
The minute word hit the streets in Baghdad of Bush's visit, over 2,000 supporters of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr took to the streets in protest. The protestors chanted "Iraq is for the Iraqis," and Sadr aide Hazem al-Araji publicly condemned the peek-a-boo visit of who he referred to as "the leader of the occupation."
Day One
The very next day, not coincidentally, Maliki instituted the biggest security crackdown in the capital city since the US invaded Iraq, dubbed "Operation Forward Together." An estimated 75,000 US and Iraqi soldiers clogged the already seriously congested streets of Baghdad, using tanks and armored vehicles to man checkpoints, impose a more strict curfew in liberated Baghdad (9 p.m. - 6 a.m. as opposed to the more generous 11 p.m. - 6 a.m.) and attempt to impose a weapons ban.
Just after "The Operation" began, a car bomb detonated, killing one person while wounding five others. Major General Mahdi al-Gharrawi who commands "public order forces" under the deadly umbrella of the controversial Interior Ministry, made a statement for which George Orwell would have been proud: "Baghdad is divided according to geographical area, and we know the al-Qaeda leaders in each area," he told reporters. "We are expecting clashes will erupt in the predominantly Sunni areas." So Sunnis in Iraq, according to Gharrawi, are tied to al-Qaeda.
Lest we forget, the Iraqi "army" ran a similar draconian security crackdown in Baghdad in May 2005 called "Operation Lightning." That one, too, was tens of thousands of Iraqi "police" and "soldiers" backed by American troops and air support. That operation, rather than quell violence in the capital, effectively alienated the Sunni populations in the city due to rampant death squad activities, mass detentions and heavy-handed tactics. Civilians across Baghdad complained about the mass detentions, random violence and torture meted out by the death squads during that "operation." And we see how well that operation managed to improve security in Baghdad over the last year.
So here we go again - only this time with even more troops, raiding even more homes, manning more checkpoints, and of course more death squads operating - with backup support from American soldiers, and of course their air strikes.
Iraq's puppet prime minister, in an effort to sooth the fear in the hearts of Baghdad's residents who are concerned about more detentions, random violence and "torture by electric drill" which the US-backed Shia death squads prefer with their victims, told reporters of the operation, "The raids during this plan will be very tough ... because there will be no mercy towards those who show no mercy to our people."
The same day "Operation Forward Together" began and the day after Bush bid farewell to Baghdad, he dismissed calls for a US withdrawal as "election-year" politics. Refusing to give a timetable for withdrawal or some kind of benchmark with which to measure success that may allow troops to be brought home, Bush said simply, "It's bad policy," at a news conference in the Rose Garden. He thought it would "endanger our country" to pull out of Iraq before we "accomplish the mission." Of his visit to Baghdad, Bush said, "I sense something different happening in Iraq."
While pounding his fist on the podium set up for him at the press conference, Bush proudly repeated his mantra of propaganda: "If the United States of America leaves before this Iraqi government can defend itself and sustain itself and govern itself, it will be a major blow in the war on terror."
That morning the Pentagon announced the death of the 2,500th US soldier in Iraq.
Meanwhile, back in liberated Baghdad, also on that same day, I received an email from a very close friend of mine. It is a sobering glimpse into "Operation Forward Together" and what Bush alluded to when he said, "I sense something different happening in Iraq."
Habibi, we are divided in three houses today. I am at our home in Adhamiya. My wife and two youngest boys are at her sister's house in Bab Al-Moudam because it's safer for them. It's a mixed Sunni and Shia area, so there are no detentions. Our daughter is with her husband in their home, and my oldest son is at his house with his wife and baby, although he is not in a safe area. There is often fighting there, but not too many detentions.
Today Adhamiya is totally under occupation since early morning. None of the shops are open, the soldiers are holding up all cars and searching them, and home raids are happening. The city is a city of ghosts. This situation is the same in all the Sunni areas. Checkpoints are all over Baghdad, the highways between Baghdad and the other cities are all closed and nobody can go on them. The airports are closed, and no flights are coming in or out of Baghdad.
We cannot leave the country until the beginning of next month. By the way, three of my son's friends were killed by explosions two days ago while they were having fruits in the market. He came home crying because of that. The situation is very bad. The son of Abdul Sattar Al Kubaisy, who is in the Ministry of Interior, has been kidnapped from inside the Ministry. He was found in one of the trash cans outside the Ministry of Interior building ... so even the offices of the government are no longer safe!!!
God is with us insh'allah [God willing].
Day Two
On Friday, the second day of "Operation Forward Together," a hospital source in Fallujah reported that 8 Iraqis, some of whom were women and children from the same family, were killed and six wounded when US warplanes bombed a home in the northeastern Ibrahim Bin Ali district of the city.
That same day, a story titled "Shiite Militias Control Prisons, Officials Say," was released by the Washington Post Foreign Service.
The story reads, "Iraq's prison system is overrun with Shiite Muslim militiamen who have freed fellow militia members convicted of major crimes and executed Sunni Arab inmates, the country's deputy justice minister said in an interview." We cannot control the prisons. It's as simple as that, said the deputy minister, Pusho Ibrahim Ali Daza Yei, an ethnic Kurd. "Our jails are infiltrated by the militias from top to bottom, from Basra to Baghdad."
The story continued, "In an interview this week, Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zobaie, the top Sunni Arab in Iraq's new government, showed photographs taken from one recent inspection of an Interior Ministry detention center. An inmate in one of the photos held out his misshapen, limp hands for the camera. The man's hands had been broken in a beating, Zobaie said. Other inmates showed massive, dark bruises on their skin; one bore a large, open infected sore. Inmates in another photo clustered around chains hung from the middle of one of the crowded cells. The chains were used to hoist prisoners by their bound hands, Zobaie said. The practice, noted frequently in inspection reports of Interior Ministry detention centers, often results in the dislocation of prisoners' shoulders.
Ninety percent of the men crowded into Interior Ministry detention centers are Sunni Arabs, Zobaie said.
Day Three
On Saturday, according to the same Washington Post story, "A group of parliament members paid a surprise visit to a detention facility run by the Interior Ministry in Baqubah, north of Baghdad. "We have found terrible violations of the law," said Muhammed al-Dayni, a Sunni parliament member, who said as many as 120 detainees were packed into a 35-by-20-foot cell. "They told us that they've been raped," Dayni said. "Their families were called in and tortured to force the detainees to testify against other people."
"The detention facilities of the ministries of Defense and Interior are places for the most brutal human rights abuse," he added.
Despite broad US efforts to encourage the Iraqi government to improve conditions in prisons, the problem of militia control could prove particularly intractable. Shiite militias such as the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army, loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, are backed by dozens of members of parliament whose political parties run the armed groups.
"You can't even talk to the militias, because they are the government," Yei said. "They have ministers on their side."
The evening of Day Three, two US soldiers were detained by resistance fighters just south of Baghdad. With a Bush administration that openly advocates the use of torture and props up a Shia Prime Minister in Iraq who says things like "there will be no mercy" when referencing his new "security operation," their fate is indeed a dark one.
Day Four
On Saturday, the third day of "Operation Forward Together," at least 40 people were killed, and over 80 wounded amidst a rash of bomb and mortar attacks, most of which took place in Baghdad. The deadliest attack occurred at an Iraqi police checkpoint, while another car bomb targeting the Iraqi army and police killed another 11 people. Meanwhile, 15 others were wounded at a joint Iraqi army and police checkpoint, also in Baghdad.
Day Five
Gunmen kidnap 10 bakery workers from a predominantly Shia neighborhood in Baghdad. 10 bullet-riddled bodies of men who had apparently been tortured were also found in Baghdad. A mortar round hit al-Sadiq University on Palestine Street in the capital city - five students and one teacher are wounded. The US military continues to search in vain for its two missing soldiers. Residents continue to stream out of the capital city of al-Anbar province, Ramadi, due to the threat of an all-out US assault on the city. Thousands of the refugees are wandering around the province with nowhere to go.
Coming Days, Weeks, Months, Years?
With Operation Forward Together off to a dazzling beginning, how long will the occupation be allowed to continue? Each passing day only brings the people of Iraq and soldiers serving in the US military deeper into the quagmire that the brutal, despicable, tortured occupation has become.
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of US war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City in January 2006. He writes regularly for TruthOut, Inter Press Service, Asia Times and TomDispatch, and maintains his own web site, dahrjamailiraq.com.
Copyright 2006 Truthout
*****
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4. FORMER DETAINEE PAINTS HARROWING PORTRAIT
OF LIFE AT GUANTANAMO BAY
Ex-detainee says suicide attempts were commonplace
_________________________________________________________________________
THE RAW STORY
Top Story
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Former_Gitmo_detainee_paints__0621.html
Avery Walker
Jailers at the US base in Guantanamo Bay have coerced confessions they knew to be false, beaten prisoners to the point of disability, and given detainees psychotropic drugs they believed were for common physical ailments, according to an account one former detainee gave RAW STORY.
The story of the Tipton Three, three young English citizens captured by an Afghan warlord and transferred to Guantanamo, has been documented in international newspaper interviews, a successful lawsuit against the US government and in the upcoming film, The Road to Guantanamo. One of the detainees, Ruhal Ahmed, spoke to RAW STORY earlier this week.
As Ahmed tries to return to his former life in West Midlands, England, he says there remains much to be learned from his time as an "enemy combatant" held prisoner by the United States.
The capture of the Tipton Three
Ahmed, Shafiq Rasul, and Asif Iqbal were boyhood friends on their way to a wedding in September 2001. Iqbal was to be married in Faisalabad, Pakistan. The wedding was arranged by his parents. Ahmed was to be best man.
But it wasn't to be. Afghan warlord and U.S. ally Rashid Dostum labeled them al Qaeda operatives and arrested all three. At the time, Dostum and others from the Northern Alliance were rounding prisoners up to hand over to the US as proof of their allegiance to US forces.
Along with what they say were hundreds of other detainees, the three were forced into containers so tight their chests pressed against their knees. Bullets pierced the walls, Ahmed says, killing some prisoners but allowing enough air in to keep others alive.
Mass graves found near Mazar-e-Sharif have since revealed that hundreds of prisoners captured by Dostum died before they ever made it into US custody. Stories of mass suffocation are not unique.
Today, Dostum is chief of staff to the commander of Afghanistan's armed forces.
'If I moved, they would shoot me'
Dostum held the three for nearly a month, along with thirty or forty other survivors. "We had no food [or] water for about two weeks," Ahmed says. "No bath, no shave. We had body lice." Ahmed recalls "bleeding everywhere" from scratching.
Things improved slightly when the men were transferred to an American airbase in Kandahar. It was there that Ahmed claims he first suffered abuse at the hands of the American and British militaries.
"I was on my knees," Ahmed recalls somberly, drifting, "and they were interrogating me at the same time... I think it was a nine millimeter in his hand. And he put it to the temple of my head, and he told me if I moved, they would shoot me." A US soldier was holding the gun, he says, and an MI-5 officer was present. Nobody, he claims, moved to intervene.
The presence of a gun at an interrogation, Ahmed says, was not unique.
"There were other guns, machine guns, always," he explains.
It was in Kandahar that Ahmed first learned of the US prison at Guantanamo Bay.
"They never told us where we were [or] where we were going," Ahmed remarks. "I was in Kandahar for six weeks, so I got to know certain soldiers. They said, 'You might go to Guantanamo.'"
"But I wasn't sure. You can't trust the guards." Even today, Ahmed claims, Guantanamo jailers refuse to tell or confirm to detainees what part of the world they're being held in.
Life at Guantanamo Bay
The guards in Kandahar weren't lying.
Ahmed was stripped down, given body and cavity searches and had his head and beard shaved. He was then dressed in goggles, a woolen cap, a jacket and what jailers called a "three piece suit": a chain that wraps around the waist, connecting handcuffs to shackles. He was on his way to Guantanamo.
There, abuse continued as "the rule, not the exception," Ahmed recalls. Interrogations would be as often as twice a day, or as lengthy as twelve hours, he adds.
Such interrogations were done under the pretense that the world was unaware prisoners were being held at the base, he says. But thanks to the guards at Kandahar, Ahmed knew better.
"I believed people knew detainees were in Guantanamo," he explains. "But we were told that nobody cares and nobody is going to be doing anything about it. After being told that a hundred, a thousand times, you start to believe it."
A change in leadership, he says, changed detainee life for the worse.
"The treatment got really, really bad when [Major General] Miller came," Ahmed avers. "That's when it all started. That's when the torture and interrogation with dogs, hot and cold environment -- stuff like that started happening."
In addition to the more widely reported use of dogs and guns in interrogations, Ahmed claims that one of the most painful forms of abuse was simply being in an extreme environment -- prisoners could be placed in cells that were allowed to grow extremely hot during the day and dropped to freezing at night.
When asked what other forms of abuse he personally experienced, Ahmed says quickly and gravely, "sexual abuse." A strange silence follows. When asked for specifics, he says simply, "I don't really want to go into details."
Major General Geoffrey Miller took over at Guantanamo Bay in November of 2002, with the aim of bringing order to the camp. He has since been reassigned to head US operations at Abu Ghraib.
The confession
"After going through five months of torture, being interrogated twice a day, left in isolation," Ahmed says, "they broke me."
He and his friends admitted to appearing in a propaganda video with Osama bin Laden and 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, both of whom he claims to have never met.
But the confession was contradicted by evidence already known to UK authorities: that Ahmed was working, on probation, and serving community service in Tipton at the time the tape was filmed.
Ahmed admits to having been arrested for a number of petty offenses, including theft, lying to police, and handling stolen goods. Though none of the crimes linked him to militant Islam, they provided investigators with a public record of his whereabouts at the time the tape was filmed.
Shafiq Rasul also admitted to appearing in the tape but was since confirmed to have been working in an electronics store in West Midlands County, England at the time the film was produced.
More strange is the fact that verification of this information -- if it ever took place -- didn't seem to be a factor in either man's release.
"They just dropped it, really," Ahmed says.
"They had no idea what they were doing," he adds. "They just wanted scapegoats. They just want people to believe that Guantanamo Bay is right."
Ahmed believes that Guantanamo interrogators were "obviously" aware that they were extracting false information from detainees. "By torturing people, you cannot make them confess the truth," he explains. "You can make them say what you want, but you can't get what you don't [already] know. Torture doesn't work."
"It shouldn't be allowed in any country, whatsoever," he adds. "Even if a tortured person is a terrorist, you've just become a terrorist by torturing them. You've actually come to his level, and that's the last thing you want."
Maj. Gen. Miller has claimed 400 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have confessed to being involved in terrorism, and have continued to provide "actionable intelligence" to interrogators.
'His name was Mishal'
"His name is Mishal, I can remember him very well, because I was [sharing a cell] with him for a long time," Ahmed recalls. "We heard that something happened to him, that he tried to hang himself. They had to take him to a separate side of the hospital, and bring in a brain surgeon to work on him."
Ahmed is convinced, based on accounts from other detainees and his own experience at the hospital, that the injuries were not a result of the suicide attempt, but of a subsequent beating from jailers. According to Ahmed, suicide attempts, though recently gaining media attention, have never been uncommon at Guantanamo Bay.
"There's hunger strikes, there's protesting, not talking in interrogation," Ahmed says, "but there's really nothing [else] you can do."
As a result, Ahmed claims that suicides, either out of protest or desperation, have become commonplace. "I witnessed many, many suicide attempts in Guantanamo," Ahmed told RAW STORY. "American officials have actually said about 26 or 46 or something like that, but when I was there, I can recall hundreds of attempts."
US personnel actively attempt to prevent suicide on the base but with methods he believes to be counter-productive to improving detainee well-being.
"If the soldiers knew that you had attempted, or were going to attempt [suicide], they would take away your towels, your clothes. Basically, you would be naked in your cell."
Ahmed also raised disturbing allegations relating to the camp's psychiatric policies. He describes a prison population that is largely unaware they are being given a psychotropic drug.
"There was no help given in terms of psyche or anything," he explains. "The only medication they gave you was Prozac--for everything, they gave you Prozac. They offered me Prozac."
"Most detainees don't even know what Prozac is," he adds. "They think it is a headache pill or stomach ache pill."
The popular anti-depressant, also known as Fluoxetine hydrochloride, is known to have the side-effects of trembling, weakness, restlessness, skin rash, insomnia, itching and changes in weight.
When reached for outside confirmation, attorneys for Guantanamo Bay inmates directed RAW STORY to earlier statements taken from the Tipton three, indicating that all made the Prozac allegation. Mr. Rasul has claimed in statements to US courts that one doctor on the base was an exception to the rule, attempting to address situational issues like loneliness before offering prisoners the drug.
When asked how he coped with conditions at the base, Ahmed's quiet and unmistakably British voice breaks with tears.
"At Guantanamo, we just had to be strong," he said. "I ask myself that sometimes."
Back into the world
During his time at Guantanamo Bay, the British embassy never responded his requests for aid, Ahmed says. And though US officials have visited the camp, he claims prisoners were never aware. None of them, to his knowledge, ever asked prisoners about conditions.
"One day," Ahmed continues, "they just told us we were coming home. We were handed over to the British government, the British police and [then] to Paddington in London."
After two days of questioning at Paddington Station, he explains, "They open the doors and said, 'you can go home.'"
The release of Ahmed, Iqbal and Rasul in March 2004 came four months after the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the detainees' legal challenge to their indefinite imprisonment without charges, and less than three months before the court sided in their favor.
"I think that was one of the reasons why we were released," Ahmed says. "It's not the reason, but it's probably one of the reasons. There was a lot of pressure on Tony Blair by the British MPs."
Ahmed is now married, with a family. Dogs and children are frequent interruptions in an otherwise sober interview.
He's been busy these last few weeks discussing detainee suicides and the upcoming film with reporters, though he plans to step away from the media after the movie's release. When asked if he plans to stay active in politics or media, he answers vehemently: "No, no, no. Only if it needs to be. [To talk about] Guantanamo and prisons alike."
But freedom from Guantanamo Bay, he says, hasn't erased the scars. "Life," he chokes, "will never be normal anymore."
Copyright 2006 Raw Story Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
*****
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5. IS THE NSA SPYING ON U.S. INTERNET TRAFFIC?
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SALON
News & Politics
June 21, 2006
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/21/att_nsa/â·¨By Kim Zetter
Salon exclusive: Two former AT&T employees say the telecom giant has maintained a secret, highly secure room in St. Louis since 2002. Intelligence experts say it bears the earmarks of a National Security Agency operation.
In a pivotal network operations center in metropolitan St. Louis, AT&T has maintained a secret, highly secured room since 2002 where government work is being conducted, according to two former AT&T workers once employed at the center.
In interviews with Salon, the former AT&T workers said that only government officials or AT&T employees with top-secret security clearance are admitted to the room, located inside AT&T's facility in Bridgeton. The room's tight security includes a biometric "mantrap" or highly sophisticated double door, secured with retinal and fingerprint scanners. The former workers say company supervisors told them that employees working inside the room were "monitoring network traffic" and that the room was being used by "a government agency."
The details provided by the two former workers about the Bridgeton room bear the distinctive earmarks of an operation run by the National Security Agency, according to two intelligence experts with extensive knowledge of the NSA and its operations. In addition to the room's high-tech security, those intelligence experts told Salon, the exhaustive vetting process AT&T workers were put through before being granted top-secret security clearance points to the NSA, an agency known as much for its intense secrecy as its technological sophistication.
"It was very hush-hush," said one of the former AT&T workers. "We were told there was going to be some government personnel working in that room. We were told, 'Do not try to speak to them. Do not hamper their work. Do not impede anything that they're doing.'"
The importance of the Bridgeton facility is its role in managing the "common backbone" for all of AT&T's Internet operations. According to one of the former workers, Bridgeton serves as the technical command center from which the company manages all the routers and circuits carrying the company's domestic and international Internet traffic. Therefore, Bridgeton could be instrumental for conducting surveillance or collecting data.
If the NSA is using the secret room, it would appear to bolster recent allegations that the agency has been conducting broad and possibly illegal domestic surveillance and data collection operations authorized by the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. AT&T's Bridgeton location would give the NSA potential access to an enormous amount of Internet data -- currently, the telecom giant controls approximately one-third of all bandwidth carrying Internet traffic to homes and businesses across the United States.
The nature of the government operation using the Bridgeton room remains unknown, and could be legal. Aside from surveillance or data collection, the room could conceivably house a federal law enforcement operation, a classified research project, or some other unknown government operation.
The former workers, both of whom were approached by and spoke separately to Salon, asked to remain anonymous because they still work in the telecommunications industry. They both left the company in good standing. Neither worked inside the secured room or has access to classified information. One worked in AT&T's broadband division until 2003. The other asked to be identified only as a network technician, and worked at Bridgeton for about three years.
The disclosure of the room in Bridgeton follows assertions made earlier this year by a former AT&T worker in California, Mark Klein, who revealed that the company had installed a secret room in a San Francisco facility and reconfigured its circuits, allegedly to help collect data for use by the government. In detailed documents he provided to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Klein also alleged there were other secret rooms at AT&T facilities in other U.S. cities.
NSA expert Matthew Aid, who has spent the last decade researching a forthcoming three-volume history of the agency, said of the Bridgeton room: "I'm not a betting man, but if I had to plunk $100 down, I'd say it's safe that it's NSA." Aid told Salon he believes the secret room is likely part of "what is obviously a much larger operation, or series of interrelated operations" combining foreign intelligence gathering with domestic eavesdropping and data collection.
"You're talking about a backbone for computer communications, and that's NSA," Russ Tice, a former high-level NSA intelligence officer, told Salon. Tice, a 20-year veteran of multiple U.S. intelligence agencies, worked for the NSA until spring 2005. "Whatever is happening there with the security you're talking about is a whole lot more closely held than what's going on with the Klein case" in San Francisco, he said. (The San Francisco room is secured only by a special combination lock, according to the Klein documents.)
Tice added that for an operation requiring access to routers and gateways, "the obvious place to do it is right at the source."
In a statement provided to Salon, NSA spokesman Don Weber said: "Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues as it would give those wishing to do harm to the United States insight that could potentially place Americans in danger; therefore, we have no information to provide. However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law."
Since last December, news reports have asserted that the NSA has conducted warrantless spying on the phone and e-mail communications of thousands of people inside the U.S., and has been secretly collecting the phone call records of millions of Americans, using data provided by major telecommunications companies, including AT&T. Such operations would represent a fundamental shift in the NSA's secretive mission, which over the last three decades is widely understood to have focused exclusively on collecting signals intelligence from abroad.
The reported operations have sparked fierce protest by lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, and have raised fundamental questions about the legality of Bush administration policies, including their consequences for the privacy rights of Americans. The Bush administration has acknowledged the use of domestic surveillance operations since Sept. 11, 2001, but maintains they are conducted within the legal authority of the presidency. Several cases challenging the legality of the alleged spying operations are now pending in federal court, including suits against the federal government, and AT&T, among other telecom companies.
In a statement provided to Salon, AT&T spokesman Walt Sharp said: "If and when AT&T is asked by government agencies for help, we do so strictly within the law and under the most stringent conditions. Beyond that, we can't comment on matters of national security."
According to the two former AT&T workers and the Klein documents, the room in the pivotal Bridgeton facility was set up several months before the room in San Francisco. According to the Klein documents, the work order for the San Francisco room came from Bridgeton, suggesting that Bridgeton has a more integral role in operations using the secured rooms.
The company's Bridgeton network operations center, where approximately 100 people work, is located inside a one-story brick building with a small two-story addition connected to it. The building shares a parking lot with a commercial business and is near an interstate highway.
According to the two former workers, the secret room is an internal structure measuring roughly 20 feet by 40 feet, and was previously used by employees of the company's WorldNet division. In spring 2002, they said, the company moved WorldNet employees to a different part of the building and sealed up the room, plastering over the window openings and installing steel double doors with no handles for moving equipment in and out of the room. The company then installed the high-tech mantrap, which has opaque Plexiglas-like doors that prevent anyone outside the room from seeing clearly into the mantrap chamber, or the room beyond it. Both former workers say the mantrap drew attention from employees for being so high-tech.
Telecom companies commonly use mantraps to secure data storage facilities, but they are typically less sophisticated, requiring only a swipe card to pass through. The high-tech mantrap in Bridgeton seems unusual because it is located in an otherwise low-key, small office building. Tice said it indicates "something going on that's very important, because you're talking about an awful lot of money" to pay for such security measures.
The vetting process for AT&T workers granted access to the room also points to the NSA, according to Tice and Aid.
The former network technician said he knows at least three AT&T employees who have been working in the room since 2002. "It took them six months to get the top-security clearance for the guys," the network technician said. "Although they work for AT&T, they're actually doing a job for the government." He said that each of them underwent extensive background checks before starting their jobs in the room. The vetting process included multiple polygraph tests, employment history reviews, and interviews with neighbors and school instructors, going as far back as elementary school.
Aid said that type of vetting is precisely the kind NSA personnel who receive top-secret SCI (Sensitive Compartmented Information) clearance go through. "Everybody who works at NSA has an SCI clearance," said Aid.
It's possible the Bridgeton room is being used for a federal law enforcement operation. According to the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, telecom companies are required to assist law enforcement officials who have legal authorization to conduct electronic surveillance, either in pursuit of criminal suspects or for the protection of national security. The companies must design or modify their systems to make such surveillance possible, essentially by making them wiretap-ready.
The FBI is the primary federal agency that tracks and apprehends terrorist suspects within the U.S. Yet, there are several indications that the Bridgeton room does not involve the FBI.
"The FBI, which is probably the least technical agency in the U.S. government, doesn't use mantraps," Aid said. "But virtually every area of the NSA's buildings that contain sensitive operations require you to go through a mantrap with retinal and fingerprint scanners. All of the sensitive offices in NSA buildings have them." The description of the opaque Plexiglas-like doors in Bridgeton, Aid said, indicates that the doors are likely infused with Kevlar for bulletproofing -- another signature measure that he said is used to secure NSA facilities: "You could be inside and you can't kick your way out. You can't shoot your way out. Even if you put plastique explosives, all you could do is blow a very small hole in that opaque glass."
Jameel Jaffer, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union's national security program, said it is unlikely that the FBI would set up an ongoing technical operation -- in this case, for several years running -- inside a room of a telecommunications company. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, passed by Congress in 1978, requires law enforcement officials to obtain warrants from a secret federal court for domestic surveillance operations involving the protection of national security. If the FBI (or another federal agency) wanted data, it would more likely be targeting a specific individual or set of individuals suspected of engaging in criminal or terrorist activities. The agency would obtain a warrant and then call AT&T, or show up in person with the warrant and ask for the wiretap to be engaged. According to Jaffer, the FBI, NSA or any other federal agency could also legally tap into communications data under federal guidelines using technical means that would not require technical assistance of a telecom company.
In an e-mail statement to Salon, FBI spokesperson Paul Bresson said: "The FBI does not confirm whether or not we are involved in an alleged ongoing operational activity. In all cases, FBI operations are conducted in strict accordance with established Department of Justice guidelines, FBI policy, and the law."
Rather than specifically targeted surveillance, it is also possible that the Bridgeton room is being used for a classified government project, such as data mining, with which the Pentagon has experimented in the past. Data mining uses automated methods to search through large volumes of data, looking for patterns that might help identify terrorist suspects, for example. According to Tice, private sector employees who work on classified government projects for the NSA are required to undergo the same kind of top-secret security clearance that AT&T workers in the Bridgeton room underwent.
According to the former network technician, all three AT&T employees he knows who work inside the room have network technician and administration backgrounds -- not research backgrounds -- suggesting that those workers are only conducting maintenance or technical operations inside the room.
Furthermore, Tice said it is much more likely that any classified project using data collected via a corporate facility would take place in separate facilities: "The information that you garner from something like a room siphoning information and filtering it would be sent to some place where you'd have people thinking about what to do with that data," he said.
Dave Farber, a respected computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and former chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission, also said it is likely that data collected in a facility like the Bridgeton center would be used elsewhere, once the facility is set up to divert the data. "If I own the routers, I can put code in there to have them monitor for certain data. That's not a particularly difficult job," said Farber, who is considered one of the pioneers of Internet architecture. Farber said that "packets" of data can essentially be copied and then sent to some other location for use. "Most of the problems would have to do with keeping your staff from knowing too much about it."
According to the former network technician, workers at Bridgeton, at the direction of government officials, could conceivably collect data using any AT&T router around the country, which he says number between 1,500 and 2,000. To do so, the company would need to install a wiretap-like device at select locations for "sniffing" the desired data. That could explain the purpose of the San Francisco room divulged by Klein, as well as the secret rooms he alleged existed at AT&T facilities in other U.S. cities.
"The network sniffer with the right software can capture anything," the former network technician said. "You can get people's e-mail, VoIP phone calls, [calls made over the Internet] -- even passwords and credit card transactions -- as long as you have the right software to decrypt that."
In theory, surveillance involving Internet communications can be executed legally under federal law. "But with most of these things," Farber said, "the problem is that it just takes one small step to make it illegal."
Kim Zetter is an investigative reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Copyright 2006 Salon Media Group, Inc.
*****
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NEW STATESMAN
Commentary
Monday 19th June 2006
http://www.newstatesman.com/200606190029
John Pilger
The most vulnerable people in Gaza are suffering the worst acute mental and physical trauma as a result of Israel's actions: almost half the population is under 15.
Arthur Miller wrote, "Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
Miller's truth was a glimpsed reality on television on 9 June when Israeli warships fired on families picnicking on a Gaza beach, killing seven people, including three children and three generations. What that represents is a final solution, agreed by the United States and Israel, to the problem of the Palestinians. While the Israelis fire missiles at Palestinian picnickers and homes in Gaza and the West Bank, the two governments are to starve them. The victims will be mostly children.
This was approved on 23 May by the US House of Representatives, which voted 361-37 to cut off aid to non-government organisations that run a lifeline to occupied Palestine. Israel is withholding Palestinian revenues and tax receipts amounting to $60m a month.
Such collective punishment, identified as a crime against humanity in the Geneva Conventions, evokes the Nazis' strangulation of the Warsaw ghetto and the American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s. If the perpetrators have lost their minds, as Miller suggested, they appear to understand their barbarism and display their cynicism. "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet," joked Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert.
This is the price Palestinians must pay for their democratic elections in January. The majority voted for the "wrong" party, Hamas, which the US and Israel, with their inimitable penchant for pot-calling-the-kettle-black, describe as terrorist. However, terrorism is not the reason for starving the Palestinians, whose prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, had reaffirmed Hamas's commitment to recognise the Jewish state, proposing only that Israel obey international law and respect the borders of 1967. Israel has refused because, with its apartheid wall under construction, its intention is clear: to take over more and more of Palestine, encircling whole villages and eventually Jerusalem.
The sniper's wound
The reason Israel fears Hamas is that Hamas is unlikely to be a trusted collaborator in subjugating its own people on Israel's behalf. Indeed, the vote for Hamas was actually a vote for peace. Palestinians were fed up with the failures and corruption of the Arafat era. According to the former US president Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Centre verified the Hamas electoral victory, "public opinion polls show that 80 per cent of Palestinians want a peace agreement with Israel".
How ironic this is, considering that the rise of Hamas was due in no small part to the secret support it received from Israel, which, with the US and Britain, wanted Islamists to undermine secular Arabism and its "moderate" dreams of freedom. Hamas refused to play this Machiavellian game and in the face of Israeli assaults maintained a ceasefire for 18 months. The objective of the Israeli attack on the beach at Gaza was clearly to sabotage the ceasefire. This is a time-honoured tactic.
Now, state terror in the form of a medieval siege is to be applied to the most vulnerable. For the Palestinians, a war against their children is hardly new. A 2004 field study published in the British Medical Journal reported that, in the previous four years, "Two-thirds of the 621 children . . . killed [by the Israelis] at checkpoints . . . on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half the cases to the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound." A quarter of Palestinian infants under the age of five are acutely or chronically malnourished. The Israeli wall "will isolate 97 primary health clinics and 11 hospitals from the populations they serve."
The study described "a man in a now fenced-in village near Qalqilya [who] approached the gate with his seriously ill daughter in his arms and begged the soldiers on duty to let him pass so that he could take her to hospital. The sol-diers refused."
Gaza, now sealed like an open prison and terrorised by the sonic boom of Israeli fighter aircraft, has a population of which almost half is under 15. Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children's community health project, told me, "The statistic I personally find unbearable is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma . . . 99.2 per cent had their homes bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shooting; a third saw family members or neighbours injured or killed."
These children suffer unrelenting nightmares and "night terrors" and the dichotomy of having to cope with these conditions. On the one hand, they dream about becoming doctors and nurses "so they can help others"; on the other, this is then overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experience this invariably after attacks by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes are no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".
That these children are now to be punished further may be beyond human comprehension, but there is a logic. Over the years, the Palestinians have avoided falling into the abyss of an all-out civil war, knowing this is what the Israelis want. Destroying their elected government while attempting to build a parallel administration around the collusive Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, may well produce, as the Oxford academic Karma Nabulsi wrote, "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society . . . ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and broken into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Ariel Sharon] had in store for us."
The new "body count"
The struggle in Palestine is an American war, waged from America's most heavily armed foreign military base, Israel. In the west, we are conditioned not to think of the Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" in those terms, just as we are conditioned to think of the Israelis as victims, not illegal and brutal occupiers. This is not to underestimate the initiative of the Israeli state, but without F-16s and Apaches and billions of American taxpayers' dollars, Israel would have made peace with the Palestinians long ago. Since the Second World War, the US has given Israel some $140bn, much of it as armaments. According to the Congressional Research Service, the same "aid" budget was to include $28m "to help [Palestinian] children deal with the current conflict situation" and to provide "basic first aid". That has now been vetoed.
Karma Nabulsi's comparison with Iraq is apposite, for the same "policy" applies there. The capture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a wonderful media event: what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called "action as propaganda", and having little bearing on reality. The Americans and those who act as their bullhorn have their demon - even a video game of his house being blown up. The truth is that Zarqawi was largely their creation. His apparent killing serves an important propaganda purpose, distracting us in the west from the American goal of converting Iraq, like Palestine, into a powerless society of ethnic and religious tribalism. Death squads, formed and trained by veterans of the CIA's "counter-insurgency" in central America, are critical to this. The Special Police Commandos, a CIA creation led by former senior intelligence officers in Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, are perhaps the most brutal. The Zarqawi killing and the myths about his importance also deflect from routine massacres by US soldiers, such as the one at Haditha. Even the puppet prime minister Nouri al-Maliki complains that murderous behaviour of US troops is "a daily occurrence". As I learned in Vietnam, a form of serial killing, then known officially as "body count", is the way the Americans fight their colonial wars.
Put out more flags
This is known as "pacification". The asymmetry of a pacified Iraq and a pacified Palestine is clear. As in Palestine, the war in Iraq is against civilians, mostly children. According to Unicef, Iraq once had one of the highest indicators for the well- being of children. Today, a quarter of children between the ages of six months and five years suffer acute or chronic malnutrition, worse than during the years of sanctions. Poverty and disease have risen with each day of the occupation.
In April, in British-occupied Basra, the European aid agency Saving Children from War reported: "The mortality of young children had increased by 30 per cent compared with the Saddam Hussein era." They die because the hospitals have no ventilators and the water supply, which the British were meant to have fixed, is more polluted than ever. Children fall victim to unexploded US and British cluster bombs. They play in areas contaminated by depleted uranium; by contrast, British army survey teams venture there only in full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. Unlike the children they came to "liberate", British troops are given what the Ministry of Defence calls "full biological testing".
Was Arthur Miller right? Do we "internally deny" all this, or do we listen to distant voices? On my last trip to Palestine, I was rewarded, on leaving Gaza, with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children are responsible for this. No one tells them to do it. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and one or two climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it, believing they will tell the world.
John Pilger's new book, "Freedom Next Time", is published by Bantam Press (£17.99). His website is [http://www.johnpilger.com]
Copyright New Statesman 1913-2006
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FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
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A deep political system or process is one which habitually resorts to decision-making and enforcement procedures outside as well as inside those publicly sanctioned by law and society. In popular terms, collusive secrecy and law-breaking are part of how the deep political system works. ... We see deep politics in imperial and post-imperial systems which are accustomed to use criminal assets to intervene lawlessly in other societies. ... Experience teaches us that...double agents tend to become increasingly important in the hierarchy of both the investigative agency and the party investigated. In the Vietnam anti-war movement, double agents were likely to become provocateurs, whether or not this was part of their official assignment. The greater the successful provocation, the more important the double agent to the agency to which he reports. Truly successful double agents acquire their own agendas, distinguishable from those of their agency and possibly their party as well. ... This is not a theoretical matter in this decade of high-tech terrorism. Time after time, from the fiascos of Oliver North's Middle Eastern ventures to the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 and the World Trade Center, we have seen how the tolerated crimes of double agents have proven disastrous to those who think they control them. -- Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993] pp. xi-xii, xiii.
Contents: Number 731
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 733/June 25, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 732/June 21, 2006
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1. ABRAMOFF HENCHMAN FINGERS DEAD GUY IN BOULIS HIT
Heroin Trafficking, a Pink Leather Couch & the GOPMOB
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THE MAD COW MORNING NEWS
World Exclusive
June 15, 2006
By Daniel Hopsicker
"Any politician in South Florida without handcuff marks on his wrists is considered an elder statesman." -- Carl Hiaasen
Venice, FL -- The MadCowMorningNews has learned new details about revelations from "Bagel Boy" Adam Kidan, convicted of fraud in the takeover of Sun-Cruz Casino's gambling ships alongside former Republican Party bagman & uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff in March.
Little had been heard recently from the two men. But that changed last week with the news that Adam Kidan told investigators recently that he knew who had murdered the gambling cruise line's founder, Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis, a crime which could reach all the way to the Oval Office, if only there were an opposition party in America to investigate it thoroughly.
Currently three men from New York with connections to the Gambino Family, Anthony "Big Tony" Moscatiello, 68; Anthony "Little Tony" Ferrari, 49; and James "Pudgy" Fiorello, 28, are charged with first-degree murder and could face the death penalty if convicted.
Kidan has now stepped forward to say that none of the three men pulled the trigger. Instead, Kidan is bravely pointing a finger directly at...a dead guy.
"Dead guys can't turn state's evidence, right?"
According to Kidan, it was a man named John Gurino who murdered Boulis shortly after the gambling czar left his Fort Lauderdale office on Feb. 6, 2001.
Kidan previously had denied knowing anything about Boulis' slaying when police interviewed him a month after the murder.
Examining Kidan's claim offers some insight into how the scandal is being played out. In last week's stories about him, for example, Adam Kidan was described, as he always is in major media accounts, as a "Long Island businessman."
In reality Kidan is nothing of the kind. He doesn't live on Long Island, and he is anything but a businessman, a fact made clear when he wrote checks to the three Mob figures currently in jail awaiting trial for the hit totaling over $200,000 in the weeks before Boulis' gangland-style slaying.
While much remains unknown about the dead man, John Gurino, here's one thing which will prove absolutely certain: Kidan didn't write any unexplained checks to Gurino, who has one other useful distinction as well...
He's dead.
Intimidating Witnesses: A Primer for Dunsky's
John Gurino was charged with murder once, while he was still alive, in New York.
His lawyer was Bruce Cutler. Yep... That Bruce Cutler... Gurino was acquitted of murder charges stemming from a drive-by shooting in which the victim identified Gurino as his shooter before he died.
A mortally wounded John Vulcano, the victim of the drive-by shooting, told detectives just before he died, "John Gurino shot me because he hates me."
Queens County prosecutor James Quinn told reporters for the New York Times he has spent a lot of time thinking about Gurino. Quinn watched his murder case against Gurino fall apart as the courtroom filled with tough-looking men brought in by defense attorney Bruce Cutler.
The prosecutor said he still remembers Lincoln Town Cars with Florida license tags pulling up to the courthouse, bearing license plates trumpeting Boca Raton.
Quinn said: "By the end of the trial, there was 25 to 30 people sitting in the courtroom on Gurino's side, all looking very intimidating."
The trial launched mob defense attorney Cutler's career. It persuaded Gotti, about to become the head of the Gambino crime family, to make Cutler his top lawyer, the New York Times said.
An early lesson which came in useful later
Several years later, when John Gotti himself was finally convicted, Gurino led a crowd of 1,000 Gotti supporters in a riot at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn.
The crowd tore apart police barricades and threw pieces at the police, egged on by Gurino using a bullhorn. Gurino was charged with multiple felonies.
Idle thought: did the GOPMOB find Gurino's "skills" useful in Dade County in the 2000 Presidential election during the Republican riot that forced election officials to stop counting the votes?
Gurino's father, John Gurino Sr., owned the Ragtime Newsstand Dairy in Howard Beach, a popular meeting place for Gotti associates, according to a 1998 New York Times article.
Gurino's cousin, Anthony J. Gurino, a childhood friend of Gotti's, went to prison for conspiracy to hide the assets of a multi-million-dollar heroin ring headed by Gotti's brother, and a fugitive named Salvatore Ruggiero, who died in a Lear jet crash in Georgia in 1982.
David Bogenshutz: the busiest lawyer in Florida
That's the same major heroin trafficking trial where "Big Tony" Moscatiello, immortalized forever when John Gotti called him a "fucking dunsky" while the FBI was listening, was a defendant. Afterwards Big Tony supposedly became a government informant.
Ruggiero's brother, Angelo Ruggiero, died of cancer while awaiting trial as a defendant in the drug case. From books about the Mob, we knew that John Gotti had waited, out of respect, until his mentor Ruggiero died before killing the Gambino Mob Boss "Big Paul" Castellano.
Small world.
Kidan told investigators he learned the details of the killing from "Big Tony" Moscatiello but was not told the triggerman's name. Moscatiello told him the killer was dead. Kidan said he pieced together who it was after learning that Gurino was killed in a Florida deli by his business partner in 2003.
The man convicted of killing Gurino is Ralph Liotta, 49, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Liotta's defense attorney was David Bogenschutz.
David Bogenschutz is now defending "Big Tony" Moscatiello. Small world...
It gets even smaller.
"The wages of sin make for a pretty fat roll"
The Associated Press identified the man who supplied the information about Kidan's statement to police as an investigator with the Broward State's Attorney's Office, which prosecutes the cases of the Broward County Sheriff, Ken Jenne.
The Miami Herald earlier this month revealed that Jenne had taken an unexplained loan from a certain Philip Procacci. Amid calls for his resignation, Jenne is currently being investigated by the FBI.
Jenne's lawyer? You guessed it... the ubiquitous David Bogenschutz.
Moreover Sheriff Jenne has been in trouble over gambling-related murders in South Florida before, just last year, in fact.
But wait a minute... Gus Boulis' murder was gambling-related.
An April 8, 2005 Miami Herald story headlined JENNE'S ROLE IN TRIBAL CASE PROBED reported, "State prosecutors are investigating possible public corruption that grew out of a criminal case involving the shooting of a Seminole tribal lawyer, focusing on whether the Broward Sheriff's Office interfered with the Hollywood police probe."
"Prosecutors issued subpoenas Thursday to two Hollywood detectives assigned to investigate the January 2002 shooting of Jim Shore at his Hollywood home. The detectives were questioned about Broward Sheriff Ken Jenne and his agency's involvement in the case."
Those Seminal Seminoles & Casino Jack Abramoff
Jim Shore was a top executive of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the state's preeminent casino operators. Alert readers of the MadCowMorningNews will recall the name Jim Shore from several earlier stories.
The Seminole Tribe of Florida led the way in parlaying mom-and-pop bingo parlors into today's $19 billion a year Indian casino industry. Along with legendary Chief James Billie (Wrestles with Alligators) Rob Tiller was a seminal figure in this growth.
A week before Gus Boulis was murdered, Tiller was called to take a meeting with him. Tiller says Boulis was scared. Boulis hadn't wanted to sell.
Instead, Boulis was worried he'd be whacked.
"He called me to a meeting at the Ocean Reef Club. Very snooty. You cant even land there without permission. I flew my airplane down to meet him," Tiller recalled.
"He said, 'I want out. People think I make a lot more money than I really do. I don't need the headache anymore. I want to sell my casino boats to the Seminoles.'"
"A couple days later, I hear he's been blown apart dead. See, Gus wanted to muscle his way into the casino business in a real bad way. His Miami subs were everywhere. He was using them to launder money, big-time, for somebody."
Working for the Bush Family has never been a picnic
He pointedly referred us to the manner of the Boulis hit, stating, "Boulis was murdered in the exact same way as Don Aronow, Bush's other partner."
Bush's other partner? We didn't even have to ask it. The question hung in the air. Who might that be? Even asking the question brings a shiver.
"Something is really going down bad here," Tiller stated.
"Don Aronow. Gus. Jim Shore... All tied in to Bush."
The dead guy Kidan picked to lay the hit off on has--or rather had--an interesting past.
"At least one defense attorney said he is now looking into the background of Gurino, a Gotti associate, killed in October 2003," reported the Miami Herald.
That wouldn't be Bogenschutz. Presumably, he already knows...
Kill shots to the gluteus maximus
So... Who was John Gurino, the man shot and killed in a deli in Boca Raton?
John Gurino, a longtime John Gotti associate and Gambino Mob figure from Howard's Beach in Queens, was murdered in 2003 by Ralph Liotta, who owed him 60 large. So Liotta capped Gurino seven times, including three in the butt.
It was every loan shark's worst nightmare.
Apparently Gurino was no real sweetheart either... Liotta testified Gurino had threatened to cut Liotta's throat and have men rape him in front of his family.
That's pretty icky.
Gurino and Liotta had been having a "sit-down" over the debt, after having been brought together by three other men, each of whom soon felt the need, after shots rang out, to step quickly over Gurino's body in their haste to leave the premises, even though one of them was on crutches.
Witnesses said they heard two to four loud pops and then saw Gurino fall through the front glass door. Seconds later, they said, three older men walked out casually, stepping over Gurino's body as they made their way to the parking lot.
The "boys" are big in Boca
Gurino had a knife in his pocket. But he'd left his gun in his car, presumably as an earnest of his good intentions.
His brother, Anthony Gurino, said he was with investigators when they found the gun in the car. "If my brother was going into the store to hurt him, wouldn't he have had a gun with him?"
"It was an ambush," said Vincent Sorena, a longtime Gurino family friend who lives in Boca Raton.
Vincent Sorena, Gurino's Boca buddy, was an officer of a New York-based contractor secretly controlled by the Mob. He agreed to pay $ 250,000 in penalties to settle fraud charges with the SEC.
His company did business totaling $18.1 million with New York City's Housing Authority. When this was revealed, the Authority's chairwoman, Laura D. Blackburne, resigned, after disclosures that she authorized hundreds of thousands of dollars to be spent on office furnishings, including a $3,000 pink leather couch.
The new chairwoman canceled the contracts. An $884,777 contract with the Sanitation Department was also canceled.
Blackburne was then elected a Supreme Court justice in Queens and served on both the civil and criminal benches, before being assigned this year to the treatment court in Queens, which handles drug cases.
And so it goes...
You're a very nosy fellow, kitty cat
We checked out one of the men who'd so easily stepped over their fallen comrade.
"It was determined with the FBI's help that the 1987 Camry was registered to the girlfriend of the man with the crutches, who is identified in the search warrant as a Patrick Pata. The two tried to conceal the car by putting North Carolina license plates on it, the warrant said. Pata refused to cooperate with investigators," the Miami Herald reported.
Patrick Pata lives in Lawrenceville, Ga. He is listed as the vice-president of a company called Jinny Corporation, which bills itself as the nation's largest ethnic beauty supply company.
Both he and his wife gave $2000 each to the 2004 George W Bush Presidential campaign. Strangely, he also gave a $1000 campaign contribution in 2003 to Green Bay mayoral candidate Jim Schmitt, in Wally Hilliard's hometown.
You know what happens to nosy fellows? Wanna guess?
Kidan, who has known Moscatiello for more than a decade, brought him down to Florida from Howard Beach, N.Y., in late 2000 because he wanted Moscatiello to determine if Boulis was "connected" to the Mafia.
Within a few weeks, Boulis was dead, apparently before Kidan's diligent efforts had determined his status with organized crime.
Even though Kidan ended up paying $240,000 to companies connected with Big Tony Moscatiello and Little Tony Ferrari, Kidan said Moscatiello had ordered Boulis' murder.
Big Tony ordered the hit? Why? He didn't even know Gus Boulis. He wasn't in business with Gus Boulis. Kidan and Abramoff were. What's that old expression?
For his part, Big Tony Moscatiello, who was involved in a major heroin trafficking trial of Gotti's brothers in the late 1980's, told police after his Sept. 26 arrest that he had no role in the killing and Tony Ferrari and Pudgy Fiorillo carried it out.
Moscatiello claimed Ferrari told him that Adam Kidan had ordered the hit.
If a dead guy killed Boulis, it was certainly news to Pudgy Fiorillo, who'd bragged about making his bones by killing Boulis all over New York City.
In testimony, Dwayne Nicholson, Little Tony's one-time bodyguard who went to the police immediately after Boulis was murdered, told of a confrontation between Pudgy and "Little Tony" over Pudgy's big mouth.
He said to Pudgy, "'What the fuck, man,'" testified Dwayne Nicholson. "'What do you think you're doing? Why have you been running your mouth off up in New York?'
"And Pudgy replied, 'You got paid! Everybody got paid. Except me! And I'm the one that did it! You're all fucking me out of my money!'"
"Little Tony pointed to me, and said, 'What, do you think he's dumb? I ought to bust you right here! He's standing right there and he heard every word!'"
For being such a blabbermouth, Moscatiello was even supposedly contemplating about having Pudgy whacked.
Huh? No? Okay. They lose their noses.
Like Kidan, accused killer Anthony "Little Tony" Ferrari isn't your average rent-a-thug... According to the June 9, 2004 Washington Post, Ferrari checked into Washington's posh Madison Hotel for President Ronald Reagan's funeral, along with his family and a "five-car entourage of aides."
He told the Post he even met Reagan once:
"Miami Beach business consultant Anthony Ferrari, his wife, Jessie, their young daughter and a five-car entourage of aides already were encamped at the Madison Hotel yesterday. Ferrari hoped to see the horse-drawn procession to the Capitol tonight and perhaps see Reagan's coffin in the Capitol Rotunda tomorrow."
"I'm a big fan of President Reagan," Little Tony is quoted as saying. "I met him once. The man had a big impact on America. He really loved this country and it showed."
It happened... where else? In Florida
Opinions vary on whether Kidan is himself a suspect in the murder of Gus Boulis.
At the time of Boulis' slaying, Kidan and Abramoff were locked in a contentious fight with Boulis over Sun Cruz's 12 unregulated gambling ships in Florida, a prize so precious Abramoff and Kidan admitted committing major felonies to make it their own.
But... did they stop at murder?
In a better world, this would be what is known as a rhetorical question, like asking if the Pope is Catholic.
In a better world, law enforcement authorities would already be Johnny-on-the-spot.
Alas, the Boulis murder didn't occur in a better world...
It happened in Florida.
The sad awful truth is pretty awfully sad
Kidan was sentenced to 70 months in prison and ordered to pay more than $21.7 million in restitution after pleading guilty to bank fraud charges tied to the purchase of SunCruz from Boulis.
His plea agreement with prosecutors in the SunCruz case stated that his assistance to investigators might reduce his sentence. For confidentially informing on a dead guy, we figure he should now be facing the chair.
But not in South Florida...
In South Florida hope for justice, like hope for honest elections, wilt like John Kerry in the final days of a Presidential campaign.
Its a primordial soup which grows ever-thicker, as the web of connections grows tighter between the Mob and the National Republican Party.
All of this can only have been designed to provide a fig leaf of cover to allow law enforcement authorities to avoid charging two men who did have something to gain from Boulis' murder...
Jack Abramoff and Adam Kidan... Kidan has never even been named as a suspect. The reason? Prosecutors would have a hard time convincing a jury that the buck stopped with him. This is the man, after all, who wrote checks for the hit.
Adam Kidan is walking proof that, in America, "being connected means never having to say you're sorry."
Abramoff? Dangling slowly slowly in the wind? Never happen.
It apparently pays to be an Abramoff flunky. Nobody in a position to affect the outcome of the case apparently wants to leave Casino Jack Abramoff totally without recourse, facing life behind without parole... dangling slowly, slowly, in the wind.
Because under those circumstances, who can tell who he might drop a dime on?
That's when the Abramoff Scandal might go rogue.
While the headline "ABRAMOFF HENCHMAN FINGER DEAD GUY" may be technically accurate on this story, to adequately describe what's transpired requires something broader and more nebulous.
What first came to mind was the old hippie saying: "Everything is Everything." But that phrase is virtually meaningless without the recent ingestion of substances no longer freely available, even in the vast SuperWalmart of illegal drugs where so much of this story takes place.
And while the subhead, "Heroin Trafficking, A Pink Leather Couch & the Busiest Lawyer in South Florida" touches on a few highlights from what follows, it doesn't really capture the broad sweep and immense implications of what follows, either.
Here's the best we can offer:
"John Gotti's Last Laugh: Why Mob Guys Don't Stand Around on Street Corners Anymore."
Actually, the word which comes to mind on learned of the implications of Kidan's bogus statement was one we heard uttered by an old girlfriend of ours when she first laid eyes on Death Valley National Monument in California's Mojave Desert.
"It's vasty," she said. And so it was.
And so it is.
And so it goes.
Now Available! Welcome to Terrorland: Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-up in Florida, by Daniel Hopsicker, madcow@gmail.com. The two-year long investigation into Mohamed Atta & his contacts and associates in Florida. English and German editions. Order a signed copy now; $29.95: http://MadCowProd.com.
Copyright 2006 Daniel Hopsicker
*****
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2. PENTAGON CONFIRMS IRANIAN DIRECTORATE
AS OFFICIALS RAISE NEW CONCERNS ABOUT WAR
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THE RAW STORY
Top Stories
Thursday, June 15, 2006
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Pentagon_confirms_Iranian_directorate_as_intelligence_0615.html
Larisa Alexandrovna
Current military and former intelligence officials remain concerned about a US-led strike on Iran, despite the recent appearance of diplomacy on the part of the US State Department and the offer of an incentives package to Iran.
Officials point to new developments, such as a recent meeting in Rome between an Iranian arms dealer and controversial neoconservative Michael Ledeen and the March creation of the Iranian directorate inside the Pentagon, as examples of recent events similar to the lead up with war in Iraq.
These officials also add that an as-yet uncompleted 'Phase II' investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence suggests the same problems may recur when addressing Iran. They note that the Pentagon's Iranian directorate mirrors the so-called Office of Special Plans, which played a major role in feeding intelligence to the President that bolstered a case for war.
Ledeen goes to Rome
A recent trip by Michael Ledeen to Rome has raised red flags among those concerned about a potential war with Iran. Some believe that Ledeen -- a long-time advocate of Iranian regime change -- was involved in the Niger forgeries scandal.
In late 2001, Ledeen, mid-east expert Harold Rhode and Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin (who later pleaded guilty to passing classified information to a Washington pro-Israel lobbying group) traveled to Rome to meet with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and various Italian, Iranian, and Egyptian intelligence agents. Not long after, documents falsely purporting that Iraq had attempted to buy yellowcake uranium surfaced in the international intelligence community, ending up at an Italian magazine, Panorama, for which Ledeen wrote periodic articles.
Ghorbanifar and Ledeen were directly involved in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, which implicated then-President Ronald Reagan, Vice President George H. W. Bush and the highest ranking members of the Reagan administration in the illegal sales of weapons to Iran.
Ledeen's recent visit to Rome and meeting with Ghorbanifar have created new concern that something is developing with regard to US plans for Iran. Ledeen, however, denies that his visit to Italy was anything other than a personal trip with his wife Barbara.
"I did not 'go to Rome.' I went to Naples to see the San Gennaro celebration and the opening of the Fontanelle cemetery after more than twenty years of closure," Ledeen wrote in an email to RAW STORY.
"You'll be able to read descriptions in my forthcoming book, Virgil's Golden Egg and Other Neapolitan Miracles," he added.
Ledeen, who has spent the last year working on a book about Naples, confirmed traveling to Rome as part of a visit to meet with friends. When asked if he had met with Ghorbanifar while in Rome, Ledeen confirmed the allegation by intelligence sources, but said that this visit was of a personal nature, unlike his previous visit.
"We visited various friends in Rome and Florence," Ledeen said.
"[Ghorbanifar] is a friend of mine, and so, as it has been for more than twenty years, I talk to him from time to time and I meet with him when our schedules intersect," Ledeen added.
Ledeen characterized the meeting as part of a "normal friendship."
"I would say on average I see him twice a year for a day or half a day," he said. "And it's not just him, it's sometimes his wife, his daughter... imagine! A normal friendship."
Pentagon confirms Iran Directorate
Military and non-military intelligence sources have also raised worries over what some describe to as "the Iran group" and others as "the Iran working group" and still others as a "cabal" operating out of the Pentagon.
A recent article by Laura Rozen for the Los Angeles Times revealed the Pentagon has created yet another Office of Special Plans-type body called the Directorate for Iran, or the Iranian Directorate.
"The Pentagon's directorate began with six full-time staff members," Rozen reported. "But they can draw on expertise throughout the government, providing access to potentially hundreds of specialists."
The notorious Office of Special Plans -- which focused on Iraq -- is now believed by most experts to have provided a secondary conduit of cherry-picked intelligence on Iraq to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the White House.
One former intelligence official, wishing to remain anonymous for this article, described OSP in a mocking tone as a "separate channel of information."
John Pike of Global Security, a Washington-based intelligence clearinghouse, was less polite in his description of OSP.
"It was created to, as Dean Acheson urged Harry Truman, to scare hell out of the American people by making things a little bit clearer than the truth," he said.
Lt. Col. Barry E. Venable, a spokesman for the Pentagon, confirmed the creation of the directorate for Iran in both a phone conversation and an email message.
"As the State Department stated in early March (Daily Press Brief, Mar. 3), the U.S. Government is organizing itself better to address what Secretary Rice called 'one of the great challenges for the United States, a strategic challenge for the United States and for those who desire peace and freedom,'" Venable wrote.
"As a counterpart to the State Department's new Office of Iran Affairs, the Department of Defense has split off a new directorate for Iran-related policy issues from the existing Directorate of Northern Gulf Affairs in the Office of Near East and South Asia Affairs (NESA)," he added. "These regional policy offices fall within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs."
Venable also confirmed that the new directorate falls under the policy side -- more specifically -- under the new number three at the Pentagon, Eric Edelman. Edelman, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, holds the same position that Douglas Feith held when he ran OSP at the Pentagon in the lead-up to the Iraq war.
Moreover, sources say that the Iranian Directorate is staffed with many of the same people, including OSP's former director Abram Shulsky, and receives expert analysis from such controversial figures as Project for the New American Century member Reuel Marc Gerecht, who by all accounts was a failure as a CIA field officer. It also includes military personnel such as Ladan Archin, who appears to be serving in the Larry Franklin analyst role among a sea of think-tank operatives and neoconservative war hawks.
When asked specifically about Shulsky, Venable described his involvement as follows:
"Mr. Shulsky continues in his position as Senior Advisor to the USD (P), focusing on Mid-East regional issues and the [global war on terror]."
Ledeen says that he is not involved with the new Iran operation out of the Pentagon.
Iraq intelligence inquiry remains incomplete
Former intelligence officials also point to a yet-to-be completed Phase II investigation of Iraq pre-war intelligence by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
"The committee continues its work on Phase II and hopes to complete it as soon as possible," said Wendy Morigi, Communicators Director for Senator Rockefeller, Vice Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. "One of the key sections, however, which was to review the office of former Undersecretary Doug Feith, has been postponed by the Chairman until the Pentagon IG completes its own investigation."
As previously reported by RAW ST0RY, Phase II consists of several areas of focus that the Committee is investigating in order to determine Iraq pre-war planning and post-invasion failures -- specifically in five key areas:
- Whether public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq by U.S. Government officials made between the Gulf War period and the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom were substantiated by intelligence information;
- The postwar findings about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and weapons programs and links to terrorism and how they compare with prewar assessments;
- Prewar intelligence assessments about conditions to be expected in postwar Iraq;
- Any intelligence activities relating to Iraq conducted by the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCTEG) and the Office of Special Plans within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; and
- The use by the Intelligence Community of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress.
The Office of Special Plans aspect of the investigation has been part of the reason for the delay in the delivery of Phase II by the Committee and is contingent on the Pentagon Inspector General's office concluding its own investigation.
The lack of a comprehensive report as to how the Pentagon conducted itself prior to the Iraq war, as well as afterward, raises suspicions among some still in uniform about the Pentagon's Iran Directorate's role going forward. Many see parallels between what is already known about the Office of Special Plans and what appears to be escalating activity surrounding Iran.
Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, told RAW STORY that "In the short term the risk for military confrontation [with Iran] has been reduced," but cautions that "In the long run, however, unless there are talks taking place the risk for a military strike remains the same."
Copyright 2006 Raw Story Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
*****
THE CONSORTIUM FOR INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM
Suite 102-231, 2200 Wilson Blvd.
Arlington, VA 22201
E-mail: consortnew@aol.com
Web: http://www.consortiumnews.com
- Friday, June 16, 2006 -
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3. THE HARIRI MIRAGE: LESSONS UNLEARNED
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By Robert Parry
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/061506.html
In October 2005, the drumbeat had begun for a confrontation with a rogue Middle East regime based on supposedly strong evidence about its nefarious secret activities. The U.S. news media trumpeted the regime's guilt and agreed on the need for action, though there was debate whether forcible regime change was the way to go.
A half year later, however, much of that once clear evidence has melted away and what seemed so certain to the TV pundits and the major newspapers looks now to be another case of a rush to judgment against an unpopular target.
The drumbeat in October 2005 was directed at the Syrian government for its alleged role in masterminding the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in a bomb blast in Beirut, Lebanon, on Feb. 14, 2005. A preliminary United Nations investigative report fingered senior Syrian officials as the likely architects of the killing.
"There is probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services," declared the U.N.'s first interim report on Oct. 20. President George W. Bush immediately termed the findings "very disturbing" and called for the Security Council to take action against Syria.
The U.S. press quickly joined the stampede in assuming Syrian guilt. On Oct. 25, a New York Times editorial said the U.N. investigation had been "tough and meticulous" in establishing "some deeply troubling facts" about Hariri's murderers. The Times demanded punishment of top Syrian officials and their Lebanese allies implicated by the investigation, although the Times cautioned against the Bush administration's eagerness for "regime change."
But -- as we noted at the time -- the U.N. investigative report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis was anything but "meticulous." Indeed, it read more like a compilation of circumstantial evidence and conspiracy theories than a dispassionate pursuit of the truth. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Dangerously Incomplete Hariri Report."]
Mehlis's initial report, for instance, had failed to follow up a key lead, the Japanese identification of the Mitsubishi Canter Van that apparently carried the explosives used in the bombing that killed Hariri and 22 others. The van was reported stolen in Sagamihara City, Japan, on Oct. 12, 2004, four months before the bombing, but Mehlis's hasty report indicated no effort to investigate how the vehicle got from the island of Japan to Beirut or who might have last possessed it.
False Leads
The report also relied heavily on the testimony of two dubious witnesses. One of those witnesses -- Zuhair Zuhair Ibn Muhammad Said Saddik -- was later identified by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel as a swindler who boasted about becoming "a millionaire" from his Hariri testimony.
The other, Hussam Taher Hussam, later recanted his testimony about Syrian involvement, saying he lied to the Mehlis investigation after being kidnapped, tortured and offered $1.3 million by Lebanese officials.
Some observers believed Mehlis had found himself under intense international pressure to reach negative conclusions about Syria, much like the demands put on U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix when he was searching Iraq for alleged weapons of mass destruction in early 2003. Unable to find WMD despite U.S. insistence that the WMD was there, Blix tried to steer a middle course to avert a head-on confrontation with the Bush administration, which nevertheless brushed aside his muted objections and invaded Iraq in March 2003.
Similarly, after the Hariri assassination, the Bush administration made clear its animosity toward Syria by escalating its anti-Syrian rhetoric, also blaming the government of Bashar Assad for the infiltration of foreign jihadists into Iraq where they have attacked U.S. troops. So, Mehlis's accusations against Syria helped advance Bush's geopolitical agenda.
But having relied on "witnesses" who now appear to have been set-ups, Mehlis found his investigation under a cloud. In a follow-up report on Dec. 10, 2005, he sought to salvage his position by hurling accusations of witness tampering at Syrian authorities. But by then, as noted in a New York Times news article, the conflicting accusations had given the Mehlis investigation the feel of "a fictional spy thriller." [NYT, Dec. 7, 2005]
Mehlis withdrew from the investigation and was replaced by Serge Brammertz of Belgium in early 2006.
Revamped Probe
Over the past several months, Brammertz quietly jettisoned many of Mehlis's conclusions and began entertaining other investigative leads, examining a variety of possible motives and a number of potential perpetrators in recognition of the animosities Hariri had engendered among business competitors, religious extremists -- and political enemies.
Brammertz said "the probe was ... developing a working hypothesis regarding those who had commissioned the crime," according to a U.N. statement, which was released after Brammertz briefed the Security Council on June 14. "Given the many different positions occupied by Mr. Hariri, and his wide range of public and private-sector activities, the [U.N.] commission was investigating a number of different motives, including political motivations, personal vendettas, financial circumstances and extremist ideologies, or any combination of those motivations."
In other words, Brammertz had dumped Mehlis's single-minded theory that had pinned the blame on senior Syrian security officials and was approaching the investigation with an open mind. As part of his "wide reach," Brammertz said he had made 32 requests for information to 13 different countries.
Though Syria's freewheeling intelligence services and their Lebanese cohorts remain on everyone's suspect list, Brammertz has adopted a far less confrontational and accusatory tone toward Syria than Mehlis did. Brammertz said cooperation from Syria "has generally been satisfactory" as its government responded to investigative requests "in a timely manner."
Syria had kind words for Brammertz's report, too. Fayssal Mekdad, Syria's Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, praised "its objectivity and professionalism" and said the investigators "had begun to uncover the truth a few months ago," after Mehlis departed. Mekdad promised that Syria would continue supporting efforts "to unveil and uncover the truth about the assassination," according to the June 14 U.N. statement.
Mekdad said he believed the biggest danger from the investigation was "exploitation by certain parties, inside or outside the region, the tendency to 'jump to conclusions or prejudgments not based on clear evidence or proof,' and attempts to provide false evidence to the [U.N.] commission for the main purpose of pressuring Syria," the U.N. statement read.
The Syrian diplomat added that the investigation should continue in its pursuit of solid evidence about Hariri's murder, free from "politicization and false and erroneous hypotheses," according to the U.N. statement.
Missed Story
Though the U.N. statement contained no direct criticism of Mehlis's earlier efforts, Brammertz's investigation represented an obvious break from the approach of his predecessor. Still, the U.S. news media, which had played the initial Mehlis accusations against Syria as front-page news, barely mentioned the shift in the revamped U.N. probe.
Virtually nothing has appeared in the U.S. news media that would alert the American people to the fact that the distinct impression they got last year -- that the Syrian government had engineered a terrorist bombing in Beirut -- was now a whole lot fuzzier. Much like the failure to highlight contrary evidence against the Bush administration's claims about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction in 2002 and early 2003, the national press corps apparently doesn't want to be seen as questioning the evidence against Syria.
On one level, this failure to be evenhanded with an unpopular regime like Syria goes to the career fears of journalists who can expect that balanced reporting in such a case might earn the label "Syrian apologist." That risk rises dramatically if it turns out later that the Syrian security officials were guilty after all.
Journalists faced similar worries during the run-up to the Iraq War when any skepticism about the Bush administration's WMD claims brought down the wrath of many readers, political leaders and even news executives caught up in the war fever. Career-minded reporters judged that the smart strategy was to play up the anti-Iraq WMD claims -- even when they came from dubious and self-interested sources -- and to play down or ignore counter-evidence.
However, after three years of bloody war in Iraq and the failure of the U.S. government to find any WMD stockpiles, Americans might have expected the major U.S. news media to show a little more skepticism and exercise a little more caution when a new round of unproven allegations were leveled at another unpopular Middle Eastern regime, such as Iran on its nuclear program or Syria on the Hariri assassination.
In the Syria case, however, other factors -- most notably the military quagmire that has bogged down 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq -- gave cooler heads the time to take a second look at the evidence about the Hariri assassination and examine a wider range of possibilities. By refusing to be led in any one direction, the Brammertz investigation might even succeed in finding the truth.
But the other more intractable question remains: Is today's U.S. press corps capable of learning any lasting lessons from its past mistakes?
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Copyright 2006 The Consortium for Independent Journalism
*****
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THE NATION
Feature Story
July 3, 2006 issue
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060703/cohleresses
by LARRY COHLER-ESSES
The neoconservative campaign to equate Iran with Nazi Germany received a setback in May. Bloggers and a few journalists quickly exposed as wholly concocted a story about a new law that would require Iranian Jews to wear yellow insignia. Within days the National Post of Canada--founded by disgraced neocon media mogul Conrad Black and now owned by the no less hawkish Asper family--was forced to apologize publicly for its "scoop." But by then the New York Post, Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report, right-wing blogs and some wire services had picked up the claim, bringing the phony news to millions.
Few ran retractions. And despite the debunking, the story's powerful visual imagery was likely lasting for casual readers. Over headlines blaring Iran, some papers ran photos of Jews from the Nazi era wearing the yellow stars that separated them from their fellow citizens before their slaughter.
Nevertheless, the debunking exposed the moving parts of a media machine intent on priming the public for war with Iran--as it did earlier with stories about Iraq's nonexistent WMD. Ubiquitous in this campaign, as it was with Iraq, is the PR firm Benador Associates. Its president, Eleana Benador, told me it was her agency that placed the article with the National Post. Its stable of writers and activists, a Who's Who of the neocon movement, includes Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Charles Krauthammer, Victor Davis Hanson and Iranian exile journalist Amir Taheri--the author of the bogus piece. Even among a crowd notable for wrongheaded analyses, Taheri stands out, with a rap sheet that leaves one amazed that he continues to be published. It is here that the role of Benador is key; the firm gives Taheri a political stamp of approval that provides entree to hawkish media venues, where journalistic criteria are secondary.
It was in 1989 that Taheri was first exposed as a journalistic felon. The book he published the year before, Nest of Spies, examined the rule and fall of the Shah of Iran. Taheri received many respectful reviews, but in The New Republic Shaul Bakhash, a reigning doyen of Persian studies, checked Taheri's footnotes. Suddenly a book review became an investigative expose. Bakhash, a history professor at George Mason University and a former fellow at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, detailed case after case in which Taheri cited nonexistent sources, concocted nonexistent substance in cases where the sources existed and distorted the substance beyond recognition when it was present. Taheri "repeatedly refers us to books where the information he cites simply does not exist," Bakhash wrote. "Often the documents cannot be found in the volumes to which he attributes them.... [He] repeatedly reads things into the documents that are simply not there." In one case, noted Bakhash, Taheri cited an earlier article of his own--but offered content he himself never wrote in that article. Bakhash concluded that Nest of Spies was "the sort of book that gives contemporary history a bad name." In a response published two months later, Taheri failed to rebut Bakhash's charges.
Yet, thanks to Benador and the outlets that publish its writers, Taheri survived to publish again. And again. The concoctions continued, with the full knowledge of his enablers. In a New York Post column last year, Taheri identified Iran's UN ambassador, Javad Zarif, as one of the students involved in the illegal 1979 seizure of hostages at the US Embassy in Tehran. San Francisco State University professor Dwight Simpson wrote the Post politely to request a correction. "This allegation is false," he explained. "On November 4, 1979 [the day of the seizure], Javad Zarif was in San Francisco. He was then a graduate student in the Department of International Relations of San Francisco State University. He was my student, and he served also as my teaching assistant."
"The newspaper didn't print the letter, and I never got an acknowledgment," Simpson told me. When an Iranian friend of Simpson's, Kaveh Afrasiabi, called Eleana Benador about the error, she initially promised to seek a retraction from Taheri if he faxed her Simpson's letter, Afrasiabi related. When he followed up, "she became hysterical," he said. And when Afrasiabi called Taheri himself, "he hung up on me."
Taheri was unreachable by phone. But Benador, who said her client was "traveling in the Middle East," was impatient with dissections of his work. Terming accuracy with regard to Iran "a luxury," she said, "My major concern is the large picture. Is Taheri writing one or two details that are not accurate? This is a guy who is putting his life at stake." She noted that "the Iranian government has killed its opponents." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "says he wants to destroy Israel. He says the Holocaust never happened.... As much as being accurate is important, in the end it's important to side with what's right. What's wrong is siding with the terrorists."
Taheri might seem to be one of Benador's biggest liabilities. In fact, he is right now the agency's proudest coup. On May 30--just days after the National Post's apology for running his false story on Iranian Jews--Taheri was one of a group of "Iraq experts" brought to the White House to consult with George W. Bush on the disastrous situation there. Who needs Hill & Knowlton when you've got Benador Associates?
Larry Cohler-Esses is editor-at-large for the Jewish Week of New York.
Copyright 2006 The Nation
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5. TALIBAN'S CALL FOR JIHAD ANSWERED IN PAKISTAN
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ASIA TIMES ONLINE
South Asia
June 16, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HF16Df01.html
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
CHAMAN, Pakistan - The "Afghan" market of Chaman in Balochistan province is within walking distance of the checkpoint that marks the border with Afghanistan's Spin Boldek area. Many thousands of people criss-cross between the countries every day.
Electronic items such as new and used video-disc players, old Pentium laptop computers and second-hand digital cameras are on sale for throwaway prices.
But as dusk settles, much of the main activity takes place in small shops that rent laptop computers, which attract teenage boys like magnets.
This correspondent entered one of the shops, where an action movie with noisy background songs was playing. The scene showed some Middle Eastern-looking youths with long beards surrounding a convoy and firing bullets and rockets. They yelled for an ambulance when one of their colleagues was injured in crossfire.
"What are you watching?"
"Jihad," replied one of the kids.
"What?" (The reply was not immediately comprehensible.)
"Jihad, jihad. Do not you understand 'jihad'?" asked the shopkeeper incredulously.
No word could better sum up the situation in this volatile area than "jihad".
But it was not meant to be the case.
More than a decade ago, the area was the back yard of the Taliban movement, from where many of its second-tier leaders emerged to bolster the government in Kabul.
But as recently as a year ago, after concerted efforts by the Pakistan government as a partner in the US-led "war on terror", the region was said to have been won over, as was to serve as a hub for trade between South and Central Asia.
Billions of dollars were poured into infrastructure, notably highways, tunnels and railway tracks to connect Chaman with Gwadar port on the Balochistan coastline and Karachi port as the foundations for an international trade grid.
A town-planning blueprint was drawn up to transform Chaman into a modern commercial city in preparation for its new role as a gateway to Central Asia.
In one respect the plan worked. There are definite signs of prosperity in the town and its surrounds, manifested in flashy cars, abundant markets and lavish houses.
And it has become a hub - a hub for radicalism.
"All the districts near the Afghan border, whether it is Chaman or Pashin, have been heavily radicalized. We hear news every other day in our villages or nearby villages that the body of a youth has came back from Afghanistan," Abdul Rahman, a resident of Pashin who runs a non-governmental organization (NGO) for HIV/AIDS awareness, told Asia Times Online.
"We wander from village to village in Chaman and other districts and we see that youths do not have any other passion in life but to go to Afghanistan and kill Americans," Rahman said.
Asghar, a local trader, added: "Exactly the same trend exists on the other side of the border in Spin Boldek and Kandahar." Asghar, who frequently travels to Kandahar and Spin Boldek, continued: "It's the same tribes, the same people on the both side of the divide."
It's no surprise, therefore, that the favorite movies for young males are Jung hi Jung ("War and War" - a story of Taliban-led operations against the Americans) and Kelai Jungi, the story of the massacre of Taliban detainees in Mazar-i Sharif in 2001.
Also popular are old-stock videos of the Iraqi resistance and jihadi songs and films. Stores also sell new movie releases, whether they be Pashtu, Indian or Persian.
"All the CDs [compact discs] come from Afghanistan. We just cut and paste from the CD writer and make copies for sale," a store owner said. They sell for about 50 US cents each.
NGO worker Rahman blames the radicalization of the youths on the mullahs, who he says deliberately whip up the fever of jihad so that they can get their hands on the steady flow of jihadist funds from abroad.
"No, this is not the case," said cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan. "This [radicalization] is [because of] America's worldwide oppressive policies, which generate this sort of reaction, and also what has been done by the government of Pakistan.
"They killed hundreds in the name of the 'war on terror' and handed over hundreds to the US. They carried out assaults in Waziristan [Pakistani tribal area]," Imran Khan told Asia Times Online in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan. "Had I been a Waziristani, I would have been doing the same that the Waziristanis are doing against the Pakistani security forces."
Tellingly, the road from Quetta to Chaman reveals fresh wall chalkings lauding the Amirul Momineen ("commander of the faithful", Taliban leader Mullah Omar) and Quaidul Mujahideen ("leader of the mujahideen", Osama bin Laden), along with slogans wishing long life to the Taliban movement and the mujahideen.
Jihad all over again
As stated above, the Pakistani border area with Afghanistan was a fertile ground for the Taliban as it gained strength and eventually took power in Kabul in 1996. The numerous madrassas (seminaries) churned out thousands of sufficiently eager and ideologically programmed students (both Pakistani and Afghan) to join the movement.
The feeling on the ground is that once again the Pakistani border towns will fuel the Taliban fire. Here, the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) is the major power broker.
The JUI is the most influential component of the six-party opposition religious grouping, the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA).
The JUI has two factions, one led by Maulana Samiul Haq and the other by the leader of the opposition in the national parliament, Maulana Fazlur Rehman. Both factions were key patrons of the Taliban in the mid-1990s.
However, despite being a part of the MMA, Samiul Haq openly sides with Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, while Rehman's JUI is believed to have some arrangement with Musharraf's government to allow it to dominate the provincial governments in North West Frontier and Balochistan provinces.
As such, the factions officially distance themselves from the Taliban and claim they will boot out any members with such affiliations.
However, it is not as simple as that. The JUI's election success was based on its unequivocal support for the mujahideen struggle in Afghanistan against foreign invaders.
Further, the hard core of the JUI still comprises former jihadi commanders who fought alongside the Taliban during their rise to power. Because of their immense popularity, they were given tickets for national elections, in which they scored sweeping victories.
A call for action
Now, as the Taliban's spring offensive gains unprecedented momentum, these contradictions within the JUI are becoming sharp, and forcing members to take a stand.
In the latest reports of violence, news wires said that 15 suspected militants, apparently including a relative of Mullah Omar, were killed on Monday by Afghan security forces. Further heavy casualties were reported in clashes on Wednesday. Over the past month, more than 550 people, mostly militants, have been reported killed.
More than 30,000 foreign troops will be in Afghanistan within the next few months, bolstered by a large North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) presence, which is strengthening its position in the south of the country, including 8,000 from Britain.
Hekmit Cetin, NATO's chief civilian representative in Iraq, as quoted by Conn Hallinan of Foreign Policy In Focus, said, "NATO can't afford to fail in Afghanistan. If we don't go to Afghanistan, Afghanistan will come to us, as terrorists, as narcotics traffickers."
The Taliban will be ready. Mullah Mohammed Kaseem Faroqi, the Taliban commander in Helmand province, recently told The Times of London, "My message to [Prime Minister] Tony Blair and the whole of Britain is, 'Do not send your children here. We will kill them.'"
One of the voices calling for the JUI to clarify its stance is that of Maulana Noor Mohammed, a member of the National Assembly in Islamabad from Quetta and a top leader of the JUI's Rehman faction. He recently urged the JUI to support the Taliban, no matter what the cost.
Asia Times Online met Noor, who is about 80, in his Quetta office.
ATol: You asked for complete support for the Taliban. What is the rationale behind this? Do you not think that this would be an intervention in the affairs of a neighboring country?
Noor (Opening the constitution of the JUI): The constitution of the JUI clearly states that when Muslim traditions and Muslim lands are under threat, the JUI must play a role [he cited many clauses backing this up]. It clearly speaks of supporting Muslim liberation movements across the globe, that is why we support Hamas [in Palestine], we support Bosnian Muslims. When the US invaded Afghanistan we formed a council for the defense of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which we later converted into the six-party religious alliance [MMA]. The Taliban are still fighting against a foreign presence, and we should support them.
ATol: Will such support not cost you and your party heavily?
Noor: You have to understand that the JUI is actually a movement which has strong traditions and history. Our first leader was Mujadid Alf-i-Thani [who stood up against the Mughal emperor Akber when he developed the religion Din-i-Illahi, which is a mix of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism].
Shah Waliullah Dehalvi [a renowned reformist during the Mughal era who is still followed throughout South, Central and Southwest Asia] was another one, and then came Shah Abdul Aziz Dehalvi, who further picked up the pace of the movement. [Noor then gave a long list of JUI leaders over the years who had resisted oppression.]
You can see the whole legacy of our leaders is jihad, the fight against oppression and support for Muslim movements. This is what the JUI constitution speaks for.
ATol: The whole movement was just for the Indian subcontinent. It did not go into other countries.
Noor (once again reading from the JUI constitution): "To strive for the [safeguarding] of Islam, Islamic tenets and the center of Islam ... to provide support to Muslims in occupied territories and to support Muslim minorities in non-Muslim majority areas." Where is it written that it has any territorial limits? It is a global agenda.
Now I will again go back to history.
When the British attacked Afghanistan, we supported the Afghan rulers and sent our leaders, like Ubaidullah Sindhi, who stayed there for seven years, and worked for the cause of the liberation of Afghanistan. The Ulema-i-Deoband [who graduated from the Deoband Islamic seminary in northern India] had a special status in Afghanistan and was admired by Afghan rulers.
... Similarly, we had a role when the former USSR invaded Afghanistan and our leader, Maulana Mufti Mehmood [a former chief minister of North West Frontier Province and father of Maulana Fazlur Rehman], issued a religious decree in favor of an Afghan jihad, and even when the Taliban emerged we supported them.
So the question is, why not now, when [President George W] Bush and his allies have launched a wicked crusade on Muslims? Should we not support the Taliban movement because a mean General Musharraf is our ruler and he turned the Pakistan army into a US force which caught 600 Muslim mujahideen and handed them over to the US? And Musharraf proudly says this, and he killed dozens of others and detained their families.
ATol: But the MMA rules in two provinces and is not sure what to do in the "war on terror".
Noor: The MMA should adopt a clear policy about the Taliban. Does it support the Taliban or not? When the Americans threatened to invade Afghanistan [2001], as I said, we formed the council for the defense of Pakistan and Afghanistan. So what is the point to retreat?
I spoke to the MMA leadership and asked for a debate at an upcoming session of the MMA. So why not announce clear support to mujahideen all over the world, including the Taliban?
The mujahideen are the opposition force of the day against Bush and his allies. Those who keep two opinions on the MMA's role, other than [being with the mujahideen], are just Bush's allies.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan, Asia Times Online. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
*****
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THE MOSCOW TIMES
Global Eye
June 16, 2006
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/168692/
By Chris Floyd
After last week's killing of terrorist chieftain Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (or someone just like him) in Iraq, remembrances of his most celebrated alleged victim surfaced briefly in the press: Nicholas Berg, the young American businessman whose horrific beheading was publicized in a video fortuitously released a few days after the first revelations of torture by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib.
It was this video -- which featured five surprisingly chubby terrorists, masked, one wearing a gold ring forbidden by extremist Islam, another reading in halting Arabic -- that made Zarqawi the Pentagon poster boy for the insurgency. Pentagon documents unearthed by The Washington Post this April revealed that the elevation of Zarqawi's profile was a deliberate, multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign aimed at the U.S. people to foment the lie that the insurgency was largely an al-Qaida terrorist operation, not a native rebellion against the occupation. As one Pentagon general put it: "The Zarqawi Psy-Op program is the most successful information campaign to date." One can only hope that the timely beheading of Nicholas Berg was not part of this "information campaign."
Of course, Zarqawi was a Bush tool from the beginning. Before the war, his two-bit terrorist group -- operating in the Kurdish-held Iraqi north, where Saddam had no power -- was targeted for destruction by U.S. forces. But the White House canceled the strike three times, the Atlantic reports, because it would have interfered with that earlier psy-ops attack on the U.S. people: selling the Iraq invasion. The war-peddlers needed Zarqawi to "prove" the nonexistent link between Saddam and al-Qaida.
But despite the central role that Berg unwillingly played in the concoction of the Zarqawi legend, he was largely airbrushed from the lurid coverage of its grand finale. That's because any new story on Berg would naturally center around his most outspoken survivor, his father Michael. And Michael Berg is a man with a dangerous message, a radical subversion of every value that the Bush administration is fighting to preserve.
In many ways, of course, it's an ancient danger, a destabilizing notion that has threatened the guardians of civilization for thousands of years. Its advocates have always been relegated to the lunatic fringe, ignored and forgotten, except in rare cases when their subversion has taken hold, usually among the lower orders. In each such case, however, the civilized world has, like a healthy body, acted swiftly to remove the carriers of disorder. Still, in every generation the bacillus emerges once again, and Michael Berg, no doubt weakened by his grief, has become seriously infected.
It's no wonder, then, that his media appearances last week were so brief and circumscribed. For there he was, the father of a victim murdered in the most gruesome fashion imaginable by the terrorist Zarqawi (or someone just like him), a survivor fully entitled to exult in the revenging fury and violent self-righteousness that are among the chief values of the Bush imperium -- and all Berg could talk about was mercy and forgiveness. He would not even take pleasure in the death of Zarqawi, whom he called a "fellow human being." Instead, he grieved for Zarqawi's family and wished that the brutal killer could have been subjected to "restorative justice" -- made to work in a hospital with children maimed by war, for example -- setting him on a path where his human decency might have been restored.
Nor would Berg praise that guardian of civilization, President Bush, for finally ending the career of the terrorist he had used so cynically to justify aggressive war. Instead, Berg blamed Bush for unleashing mass death on the people of Iraq, and instigating the cycle of violence that had consumed his son -- in murky circumstances. Just before his death, Nicholas Berg had been held by U.S. forces for 13 days without any charges or stated reason, missing his scheduled flight home; he was released only after his family filed a lawsuit charging illegal detention. Four days later, he disappeared again, into that dark maw where high politics and low murder feast on the same lies, the same flesh.
But even for the authors of war, for the state terrorists who kill on an industrial scale, Berg called for restoration, not revenge: They should be removed from power and compelled to some compassionate labor that might redeem their corrupted humanity.
It goes without saying that Berg's comments were instantly condemned throughout the vast engine of bile-driven groupthink known as the right-wing media. He was reviled as a traitor, a fool, a terrorist-lover, "less than human," a monster whose son will slap his face in the afterlife. He was derided for his quixotic congressional campaign as the Green Party candidate for Delaware: What place do such weapons of the weak -- mercy, forgiveness, nonviolence -- have in the halls of power? For the mainstream, he was just a blip, a quirky diversion in the flood of triumphant stories on Zarqawi's demise.
And to be sure, it is foolish to oppose the cherished values of our 21st-century civilization: violence, bluster, ignorance and fear. It's foolish to take upon oneself the responsibility to break the cycle of violence at last, to say, "Let it end with me, if nowhere else; let it end now, no matter what the provocation; let something new, something more human, some restoration take root in this bloodstained ground."
But what if such folly is the only way for humankind to begin climbing out of the festering pit we have made of the world?
Copyright 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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- AFIB No. 730, June 14, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
There is no question that the U.S. support for the mujahideen, most of which went to the hard-core Islamists, was a catastrophic miscalculation. It devastated Afghanistan itself, led to the collapse of its government, and gave rise to a landscape dominated by warlords, both Islamists and otherwise. It created a worldwide network of highly trained Islamic fighters from a score of countries, linked together and roughly affiliated to Osama bin Laden's soon-to-be established Al Qaeda organization. It left behind a shattered nation that played host to Al Qaeda and other assorted terrorist formations. And it set up conditions under which Pakistan's ISI could encourage the growth of the Taliban movement in the 1990s. -- Robert Dreyfuss, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam [New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005] p. 288.
Contents: Number 730
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 732/June 21, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 731/June 18, 2006
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1. REVEALED: THE SHRAPNEL EVIDENCE THAT POINTS TO ISRAEL'S GUILT
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THE INDEPENDENT
World: Middle East
14 June 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article994070.ece
By Donald Macintyre in Beit Lahiya, Gaza
Israel has dismissed continuing calls for an independent international inquiry into the beachfront explosion which killed seven members of a Palestinian family in Gaza last Friday after its own internal military investigation decided it was not responsible for the blast.
As the military investigation team insisted that artillery fire had stopped by the time the explosion occurred and suggested it had been caused by a bomb planted in the sand, Amir Peretz, the Defence Minister, declared: "The accumulating evidence proves that this incident was not due to Israeli forces."
But the official interpretation was strongly challenged by a former Pentagon battle damage expert who has surveyed the scene of the beach explosion. He said yesterday that "all the evidence points" to a 155mm Israeli land-based artillery shell as its cause.
Marc Garlasco, who worked in war zones including Iraq and Kosovo during his seven-year stint in the US Department of Defence, called for an independent investigation into the killings after concluding that shell fragments and shrapnel from the site, the size and distribution of the craters on the beach, and the type of injuries sustained by the victims made Israeli shelling easily the likeliest cause.
His assessment came as at least another seven civilians, including two children, as well as two Islamic Jihad militants, were killed in a double Israeli missile strike on a VW van in the densely populated Zeitoun district of Gaza City yesterday. The two children were hit at a nearby house by flying shrapnel and the civilian dead included three medical workers from a nearby children's hospital who rushed to help after hearing the first explosion.
Israel said the militants had been on their way to launch Katyusha rockets which have a much longer range than the Qassam rockets normally fired from Gaza into Israel. One of the two dead Islamic Jihad militants was Hamoud Wadiya, described as the top rocket launcher in the faction. Mr Peretz said before the strike that Israel was resuming operations "to protect the citizens of Israel" after a pause caused by what he had acknowledged had been "the international storm" over the civilian deaths at the Beit Lahia beach last Friday.
The debate over the beach explosion is unlikely to die down however. Mr Garlasco who is now the senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, said yesterday: "Of course I can't be completely conclusive but all the evidence points to its being a 155mm Israeli shell which killed the Palestinians on the beach."
Mr Garlasco said that most of the serious injuries of the victims in the Gaza hospitals that he had visited were to the torsos and heads, which were inconsistent with a land mine or of a bomb embedded in the sand. "If this had been a landmine I would have expected to see serious leg injuries," he said. Mr Garlasco said that while he could not rule out the theoretical possibility that Palestinian militants had rigged up an unexploded 155mm shell to make an explosive device of their own, that too would have normally produced many more severe leg injuries.
Mr Garlasco produced a four to five-inch, mainly blackened shell fragment which he collected about 100 yards from the scene of the explosion and in which the figures 55 and the letters "mm" are clearly discernible. While acknowledging that this was not itself definite proof that the shell had killed the Palestinians he said some fragments and shrapnel which the Palestinian police explosives department say they took from the scene where the victims were killed were definitely from a 155mm shell.
Mr Garlasco who accompanied a small group of journalists to the Beit Lahia beach, pointed to three separate craters, each covered in a whitish powder, which he said were fresh, one of which was at the spot where witnesses agree the fatal blast occurred, and the two others separated it from it by about 120 and 250 yards. Mr Garlasco added: "It would be a really ridiculous coincidence if there is active shelling and then suddenly an IED [improvised explosive device] goes off."
The military have admitted firing earlier in the area but now say that the explosion occurred between 4.47 and 5.10pm, when it says firing had stopped. An ambulance driver from the nearby al-Awda hospital, Khaled Abu Sada, said that he first took a call about the emergency at 4.50pm.
The military did not explicitly repeat claims in earlier leaks that Hamas had planted the device or say whether it was a dud shell. It says that shrapnel taken from the bodies of victims being treated in Israeli hospitals was not from a 150mm shell. But Mr Garlasco said that copper-lined shrapnel taken from two injured girls who had been in a car at the time of the blast and from the car itself were consistent with such a shell fired by a M109 howitzer.
Mr Garlasco ruled out the possibility that the shells were naval, as originally thought, on the grounds that they were too large to be fired from Israeli navy coastal vessels.
Copyright 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
*****
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- Monday, 12 June 2006 -
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2. THREE PRISONERS COMMIT SUICIDE IN GUANTANAMO GULAG
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/guan-j12.shtml
By Patrick Martin
In an act of desperation that underscores the monstrous conditions at the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, three prisoners committed suicide early Saturday morning, hanging themselves with primitive nooses made from bed sheets. The deaths were the first among Guantanamo prisoners to be confirmed by US authorities.
Two of the prisoners were Saudi nationals and the third was Yemeni, according to American officials. All three left behind suicide notes written in Arabic, although none were made public. The three men had been involved in hunger strikes over the past year carried out by detainees to protest their sadistic and illegal treatment. The hunger strikers, including the three who took their own lives, have been force-fed by their captors, who have used the brutal procedure of strapping their victims into metal chairs and shoving feeding tubes down their throats.
The triple suicide is the latest in a series of increasingly desperate actions by the Guantanamo prisoners, who have in many cases been held for more than four years, have been denied the minimum legal rights required under international conventions, and confront the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in the US prison camp.
Since the facility opened there have been 41 suicide attempts by 25 detainees, officials said, including 23 attempts during August of 2003, 10 on a single day, although these efforts were not revealed by the Pentagon until January of 2005.
There have been multiple hunger strikes in 2005 and 2006, some involving as many as a third of all the prisoners. Last fall the US Southern Command, which runs the prison, decided to begin systematic force-feeding, employing a method of insertion of the feeding tube so violent that it frequently caused internal bleeding. Under this torture, the bulk of prisoners abandoned the hunger strike, although several dozen resumed the strike earlier this year.
Last month, two detainees attempted suicide by overdoses of antidepressant drugs they had accumulated in their cells. A few days later there was an organized uprising, in which a half-dozen prisoners attacked guards with makeshift weapons.
US officials refused to release the names of the three suicide victims, but the Interior Ministry of Saudi Arabia identified the two Saudis as Ani bin Shaman bin Turki al Habradi and Yasser Talal Abdullah Yahya al Zahrani.
A Saudi attorney for his country's detainees at Guantanamo, Katib al-Shimary, denounced the US government for the suicides, while suggesting that the three may have been murdered. "Their suicide, that is, if they did commit suicide, is a response to the oppression and injustice they lived in," he told the satellite television station Al-Arabiya. "I hold the US authorities responsible for their deaths."
US officials have refused to allow foreign lawyers to meet with any of the detainees, limiting the consultations to lawyers who are US citizens and have security clearances from the Pentagon.
The deputy director of the state-sponsored Saudi Human Rights Group, Mufleh al-Qahtani, said in a statement to the local press, "There are no independent monitors at the detention camp so it is easy to pin the crime on the prisoners ... it's possible they were tortured."
Other defense attorneys and civil liberties and human rights organizations joined in the denunciation of the Guantanamo regime, in which prisoners--the majority kidnapped from Afghanistan during and after the US invasion--have been held in isolation, with little contact with the outside world and no prospect of having their cases heard by a court or other panel where their rights would be respected. Only ten of the approximately 460 men now held at Guantanamo have been charged with any crime, and none have been tried.
The vast majority of the prisoners at Guantanamo are either rank-and-file soldiers seized on the battlefield in Afghanistan or the victims of kidnapping by the Northern Alliance or the Pakistani military dictatorship, who were then sold to the US military for profit.
William H. Goodman, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents several hundred prisoners in lawsuits filed in US courts, said, "These are the latest victims and the most serious so far in the ongoing effort of this administration to impose a lawless system that denies justice, fairness and due process to people throughout the world."
"We all had the sense that these men were getting more and more hopeless," Goodman added. "This is an act of desperation because they have no way to prove their innocence. A system without justice is a system without hope."
Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch in New York, told the BBC the men had probably been driven by despair. "These people are despairing because they are being held lawlessly," he said. "There's no end in sight. They're not being brought before any independent judges. They're not being charged and convicted for any crime."
An official of Amnesty International in Washington DC, Jumana Musa, said "People have been indefinitely detained for five years without any prospect of ever going home, or ever seeing their families, or ever being charged, or having any resolution. There is no question that serious psychological trauma comes from that."
The United Nations commission against torture joined the growing international condemnation of Guantanamo last month, declaring the treatment of the prisoners, particularly their indefinite detention without prospect of trial or eventual release, a form of torture. The commission called on the Bush administration to close the prison.
Bush has made several comments recently suggesting that he would like to see the facility closed and the prisoners put on trial. But these noises are merely for international consumption: in practice, the Pentagon has begun a $30 million expansion of the prison to make room for another100 medium-security prisoners.
None of the condemnations by outside agencies and human rights groups, however, are as damning as the truly pathological comments made by the two top military officials responsible for Guantanamo, base commander Rear Admiral Harry Harris and General John Craddock, head of the Southern Command.
Harris said the three prisoners had "no regard for life, either ours or their own... I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."
Craddock added, "This is a determined, intelligent, committed element. They continue to do everything they can... to become martyrs in the jihad."
The Orwellian character of these remarks, worthy of the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp, needs no elaboration. A regime which can portray the suicide of desperate prisoners as an "an act of... warfare waged against us" is capable of any lie or any crime.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
TRUTHOUT
767 South San Pedro St.
Los Angeles CA, 90014
Editor, Marc Ash
Tel: 1.213.489.1971
E-mail: ma@truthout.com
- Monday, 12 June 2006 -
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
Perspective
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/061206J.shtml
By Marjorie Cohn
They are smart, they are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us. -- Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., Commander, Joint Task Force, Guantanamo
Three men being held in the United States military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, killed themselves by hanging in their cells on Saturday. The Team Bush spin machine immediately swept into high gear.
Military officials characterized their deaths as a coordinated protest. The commander of the prison, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., called it "asymmetrical warfare."
Colleen Graffy, the deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, said taking their lives "certainly is a good PR move."
Meanwhile, George W. Bush expressed "serious concern" about the deaths. "He stressed the importance of treating the bodies in a humane and culturally sensitive manner," said Christie Parell, a White House spokeswoman.
How nice that Bush wants their bodies treated humanely, after treating them like animals for four years while they were alive. Bush has defied the Geneva Conventions' command that all prisoners be treated humanely. He decided that "unlawful combatants" are not entitled to humane treatment because they are not prisoners of war.
Article 3 Common to the Geneva Conventions requires that no prisoners, even "unlawful combatants," may be subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment. Incidentally, the Pentagon has decided to omit the mandates of Article 3 Common from its new detainee policies.
Bush resisted the McCain anti-torture amendment to a spending bill at the end of last year, sending Dick Cheney to prevail upon John McCain to exempt the CIA from its prohibition on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners. When McCain refused to alter his amendment, Bush signed the bill, quietly adding one of his "signing statements," saying that he feels free to ignore the prohibition if he wants to.
Bush & Co. are fighting in the Supreme Court to deny the Guantanamo prisoners access to US courts to challenge their confinement. The Court will announce its decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld by the end of this month.
This hardly sounds like a man who believes in humane treatment for live human beings.
The three men who committed suicide, Mani bin Shaman bin Turki al-Habradi, Yasser Talal Abdulah Yahya al-Zahrani, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed, were being held indefinitely at Guantanamo. None had been charged with any crime. All had participated in hunger strikes and been force-fed, a procedure the United Nations Human Rights Commission called "torture."
"A stench of despair hangs over Guantanamo. Everyone is shutting down and quitting," said Mark Denbeaux, a lawyer for two of the prisoners there. His client, Mohammed Abdul Rahman, "is trying to kill himself" in a hunger strike. "He told us he would rather die than stay in Guantanamo," Denbeaux added.
While the Bush administration is attempting to characterize the three suicides as political acts of martyrdom, Shafiq Rasul, a former Guantanamo prisoner who himself participated in a hunger strike while there, disagrees. "Killing yourself is not something that is looked at lightly in Islam, but if you're told day after day by the Americans that you're never going to go home or you're put into isolation, these acts are committed simply out of desperation and loss of hope," he said. "This was not done as an act of martyrdom, warfare or anything else."
"The total, intractable unwillingness of the Bush administration to provide any meaningful justice for these men is what is at the heart of these tragedies," according to Bill Goodman, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many of the Guantanamo prisoners.
Last year, at least 131 Guantanamo inmates engaged in hunger strikes, and 89 have participated this year. US military guards, with assistance from physicians, are tying them into restraint chairs and forcing large plastic tubes down their noses and into their stomachs to keep them alive. Lawyers for the prisoners have reported the pain is excruciating.
The suicides came three weeks after two other prisoners tried to kill themselves by overdosing on antidepressant drugs.
Bush is well aware that more dead US prisoners would be embarrassing for his administration, especially in light of the documented torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the execution of civilians in Haditha.
More than a year ago, the National Lawyers Guild and the American Association of Jurists called for the US government to shut down its "concentration camp" at Guantanamo. The UN Human Rights Commission, the UN Committee against Torture, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and the Council of Europe, have also advocated the closure of Guantanamo prison.
Bush says he would like to close the prison, but is awaiting the Supreme Court's decision. At the same time, however, his administration is spending $30 million to construct permanent cells at Guantanamo.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, President-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. She writes a weekly column for Truthout.
Copyright 2006 Truthout
*****
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4. THE FAX THAT REVEALS THE U.S. IS FLYING TERROR SUSPECTS
TO EUROPE'S SECRET JAILS
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SUNDAY HERALD
Special Report
11 June 2006
http://www.sundayherald.com/56171
By Neil Mackay, Investigations Editor
THE intercepted top-secret fax contained information that Amer ica never wanted the world to know -- that the US was holding war-on-terror captives at clandestine "black site" prisons in eastern Europe.
The fax, datelined November 10, 2005, 8.24pm, was sent by the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, in Cairo, to his ambassador in London. It revealed that the US had detained at least 23 Iraqi and Afghani captives at a military base called Mihail Kogalniceanu in Romania, and added that similar secret prisons were also to be found in Poland, Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bulgaria.
The discovery of the fax seriously undermines the US's denial that it has ever used secret detention facilities, breaching international law. It also adds to the pressure for the release of information on "extraordinary renditions". These rendition flights see kidnapped terror suspects taken by the CIA to countries where torture is common, such as Uzbekistan. British intelligence has supported this practice and UK airports, particulary Prestwick, have given CIA jets logistical support.
The Council of Europe last week published the results of its long-running investigation into rendition and found that 14 European countries, including Britain, had colluded with the CIA. It also suggested that secret prisons were operating in eastern Europe, but did not have conclusive proof.
The fax, intercepted by Swiss intelligence, indicates that Egypt has such proof. It is headed: "The Egyptians have access to sources which confirm the existence of American secret prisons".
Its shocking contents would never have been uncovered if it hadn't been for a conscientious surveillance officer with the Swiss secret service, stationed at an eavesdropping centre in Zimmerwald, south of Berne. On November 16, six days after the fax was first sent via satellite from Cairo to London, the officer intercepted it using the Onyx eavesdropping system. The officer marked their personal coded identifier, "wbm", on the page and put the information down in a COMINT SAT report. The intercepted fax was given the reference number S160018TER00000115.
The report noted: "The [Egyptian] embassy got the information from its own sources that 23 Iraqi and American citizens have actually been interrogated at the military base Mihail Kogalniceanu close to the [Romanian] city of Constanza at the Black Sea. Similar interrogation centres exist in Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bulgaria."
The fax also referred to "prisoners being transported with American military planes from the base Salt Pit in Kabul to the Polish base Szymany and to the Romanian base on September 21 and 22, 2005." It then went on to say: "In contradiction to all quoted facts, the Romanians deny the existence of the prisons that are used to interrogate members of al-Qaeda."
The activities of one secret CIA rendition jet do indicate that captives have been dropped off in Romania. The plane, N313P, a Boeing 737, landed in Timisoara on January 25, 2004 just before midnight after flying from Kabul. It stayed on the runway for just over an hour and then flew on to Palma, Mallorca, where a CIA rendition team stayed in a hotel under fake identities.
Dick Marty, the Swiss senator who led the Council of Europe investigations into renditions, said in his report: "Having eliminated other explanations -- including that of a simple logistics flight, as the trip is a part of a well-established renditions circuit -- the most likely hypothesis is that the purpose of this flight was to transport one or several detainees from Kabul to Romania."
Rendition jet N313P also travelled from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to Kabul on September 21, 2003. On September 22, it flew from Kabul to Szymany, a Polish defence ministry airfield. Close by is the Stare Kiejkuty base used by Polish intelligence. CIA jet N313P stayed only 64 minutes before flying to Romania.
"It is possible," says Marty, "that several detainees may have been transported together on the flight out of Kabul, with some being left in Poland and some being left in Romania." After leaving Romania, the plane landed in Morocco, where "rendered" captives have been tortured with the knowledge of both British and American intelligence.
Both Poland and Romania deny allowing CIA "black site" prisons to operate on their territory. EU justice commissioner Franco Frattini has warned that any member states caught operating secret jails on behalf of the Americans could have their voting rights suspended.
Russian TV has also accused Ukraine of running a secret CIA prison near Kiev, claiming that an old Soviet site used to store nuclear weapons has been turned into a holding facility where trucks have been seen delivering shipments of people to Ukrainian soldiers.
Copyright 2006 Newsquest (Sunday Herald) Limited. All rights reserved.
*****
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5. WHIPPING AL-QAEDA INTO LINE IN IRAQ
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ASIA TIMES ONLINE
Middle East
June 13, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HF13Ak02.html
By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - Family members of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq killed by US forces last week, have begun a mourning period in his home town of al-Zarka in Jordan.
They are performing rituals that they say are not condolences but a "wedding" for Zarqawi, because he has been martyred and is going to heaven.
Be that as it may, in Iraq, Zarqawi's death has precipitated a hunt to find a successor to lead the insurgency, which itself may undergo a "softening" from the indiscriminate killing that Zarqawi favored.
On the weekend, al-Qaeda in Iraq posted a video on the Internet of the beheading of three alleged members of Shi'ite death squads, claiming they had been killed since Thursday's announcement of Zarqawi's death.
An accompanying statement, however, while vowing "major attacks", did not name a successor to Zarqawi, only saying that the group's leadership "renews its allegiance" to Osama bin Laden.
Three names have been circulated in the Arabic press as possible successors to the "Prince of al-Qaeda". One of them, Iraq-based Egyptian terrorist Abu Ayyub al-Masri, was also named by Major-General William Caldwell, the spokesman for the US military in Baghdad, as Zarqawi's replacement.
The other two are an Iraqi named Abu Aseel and a Syrian named Abu al-Ghadia. Other names have also been mentioned, as well as a possible council overseen by bin Laden to unify and direct the insurgency.
Masri (reportedly the same age as Zarqawi, born in 1966) is believed to have entered Iraq to join Zarqawi in 2002 and founded a cell for al-Qaeda in Baghdad. Like many other commanders in al-Qaeda, Masri received his training at military camps in Afghanistan during the Taliban rule (1996-2001) and met bin Laden at the Farouk Camp, where Masri was working as an instructor to young recruits. He is also reportedly close to Egyptian Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's right-hand man.
Masri met Zarqawi in Afghanistan in 2001, after the US invasion of the country, and went with him to Iraq in 2002. He is said to be an expert in creating explosives and has recruited hundreds of troops into al-Qaeda from the Middle East and North Africa.
He fled Fallujah during the battles that raged in that Iraqi city in November 2004, and since then the US government has placed a US$50,000 bounty on his head - Zarqawi's was $25 million.
Abu Aseel and Abu al-Ghadia
The real name of Abu Aseel has not been revealed, and sources in Islamic movements operating in Iraq confirm that he is a low-profile commander in al-Qaeda who avoids the limelight.
The website of the Saudi Al-Arabiya channel said these sources predicted that Abu Maysara, the spokesman for al-Qaeda in Iraq, would announce Abu Aseel as successor to Zarqawi. The chances of this happening, the site added, were 80%.
Born in 1944 in the Sunni province of al-Anbar, Abu Aseel is 62 years old. He graduated from the National Security Academy in Iraq in the 1960s. Usually, these graduates are posted at police and public-security headquarters in Iraq, but Abu Aseel was transferred to military intelligence in the Iraqi army.
He served there during the heyday of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime, and abandoned the army to join Islamic fundamentalist parties in the 1990s. He had worked closely with Zarqawi since 2002.
Ghadia is much younger than Aseel. Born in 1976, Sulayman Khalid Darwish (known as Abu al-Ghadia) is a Syrian who once lived in the suburbs of Damascus.
He currently serves as a commander of al-Qaeda's intelligence branch and a member of the Mujahideen Shura Council, a coalition of six Sunni insurgency groups created by Zarqawi in January.
He had been very close to Zarqawi since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Before that, they had met in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks on the US of September 11, 2001.
Ghadia had accompanied Zarqawi to Jordan, where Zarqawi introduced him to a Jordanian woman whom he married and took with him to Iraq. The US government had frozen Ghadia's assets in the US, saying that his job was to raise money for Zarqawi.
Ghadia is said to have channeled $10,000-$12,000 every 20-25 days to Zarqawi in Iraq, through donors and sympathizers in the Arab and Islamic world.
In Afghanistan, he had been trained by Zarqawi himself in the use of firearms and explosives. He then received further training in document fraud at the Palestinian Ayn al-Hilwe Camp in Lebanon. He allegedly received further training in combat in Iraq and Turkey before setting up permanent base with Zarqawi in Iraq.
One of his main contributions was providing fake passports and documents to al-Qaeda members traveling around the world.
Even before his death, speculation was rife within al-Qaeda on who would eventually replace Zarqawi.
Last month, a communique in the name of Zarqawi's group was posted on the Internet, saying, "The commanders met after the wounding of our Sheikh Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (may God recover him from all ill), and decided to appoint a leader who would assume command until our sheikh returns to his full health. They have decided to appoint our Sheikh Abu al-Hafs al-Qurani as leader of the mujahideen ... in executing the most difficult of tasks."
This communique was challenged by Zarqawi's official spokesman, Abu Maysara, who said, "We disclaim what has been said about the appointment of the so-called Abu al-Hafs. We announced that Zarqawi had been wounded to show the honesty in our media, and bring assurance to our brothers because it had been rumored that our sheikh had been killed."
Abu Jalal al-Iraqi, another commander who had been close to Zarqawi, had confirmed the story of his being wounded weeks before his death. According to Iraqi, Zarqawi had been wounded when a bullet pierced his right lung and settled in his back, forcing him to rely on an artificial respirator.
Also last month, the London-based daily Al-Hayat ran a story saying that four Iraqis and one Syrian (Ghadia) were competing to become No 2 in al-Qaeda, in the event that Zarqawi didn't survive his wounds.
According to the International Crisis Group, Zarqawi controlled 15% of the Iraqi insurgency, estimated by other think-tanks to be no fewer than 60 armed groups dispersed all over Iraq.
Diaa Rashwan, an expert on military Islamists at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, commented on Zarqawi's death: "Zarqawi cannot really be replaced. He was the one who founded al-Qaeda in Iraq. He was the only known name and face in the group. If this group is going to reorganize, it will do so under a new leader who will be known only by a nom de guerre. His history many not even be known."
Some believe that to avoid a power struggle, a committee of jihadis will be formed to replace Zarqawi. This would include the Syrian Ghadia, the Iraqi Aseel, the Egyptian Masri, as well as Abu Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, Abu Dardaa (commander of al-Qaeda operations in Baghdad), and Maysara, their Iraqi spokesman.
This was substantiated in a statement posted on one of al-Qaeda's websites hours after Zarqawi's death, announcing that such a committee had already been formed, without mentioning the names of its members.
Other options are that bin Laden rises to assume leadership by proxy of al-Qaeda in Iraq, through a local figure close to him. If handled by bin Laden, al-Qaeda in Iraq would focus more on combating (and killing) US troops and Iraqis working with the Americans, steering clear from Zarqawi's beheading techniques and targeted attacks on civilians and Shi'ites.
Bin Laden is said to have seriously fallen out with Zarqawi over the latter's tactics (see The new power behind Osama's throne, Asia Times Online, May 18).
Abdul-Bari Atwan, the publisher of the London daily Al-Quds al-Arabi, who is an expert on political Islam and who has interviewed bin Laden, expected that a less extremist figure, such as Abdul-Rahman al-Iraqi, would assume Zarqawi's position.
Iraqi would develop a new approach to al-Qaeda's warfare in Iraq. He would try to unify the insurgency, which splintered under Zarqawi because many were opposed to his brutal methods (especially after the senseless bombings in Amman, which gave al-Qaeda a very bad name in the Islamic world).
Many were also greatly opposed to his war on Shi'ites, and his April 25 broadcast to Sunnis to fight the Shi'ites of Iraq. By being an Iraqi, the new leader would make use of tribal relations, as well as roots, history and marriage, to consolidate power among Iraqi fighters - many of whom were not happy in the first place at being led by a Saudi (bin Laden), then by a Jordanian.
Also, an Iraqi heading al-Qaeda in Iraq would be less prone to target civilian Iraqis so freely, as Zarqawi had done, thinking - at least twice - before killing his own countrymen so savagely. Zarqawi, on the other hand, did not blink when he ordered the extermination of Iraqis.
Atwan believed that a committee headed by bin Laden would appoint the successor to Zarqawi, claiming that Zarqawi had hijacked al-Qaeda in Iraq, but grew so strong and powerful that it was difficult to sideline him - even by bin Laden.
Iraqi, or any of the new names emerging, is far more disciplined than Zarqawi and would adhere to bin Laden's orders. Bin Laden's decision, nevertheless, would have to be enforced and approved by the Mujahideen Shura Council.
The final option for post-Zarqawi Iraq is for his entire entourage to fall apart, with different commanders claiming the right to succession, and perhaps even quarreling among themselves, overall weakening the entire insurgency.
The insurgency would then splinter, perhaps losing much of its earlier power, but it would not go away. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki responded to post-Zarqawi al-Qaeda by saying, "Whenever there is a new Zarqawi, we will kill him."
Not that easy, and Maliki knows this very well. It took the Americans three years to kill Zarqawi, while bin Laden is still at large, five years after September 11.
Certainly, bin Laden will do his utmost to make sure that the insurgency does not disintegrate. Strange, but true: bin Laden will be more "civilized" in handling al-Qaeda in Iraq than Zarqawi. That's how bad Zarqawi had become.
All the same, there was an insurgency before Zarqawi, and there will be an insurgency after Zarqawi, although the names and nature might change.
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
*****
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6. ANOTHER U.S. COVER-UP SURFACES
_________________________________________________________________________
INTER PRESS SERVICE
International: Iraq
June 12, 2006
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=33581
Dahr Jamail and Arkan Hamed
BAGHDAD, Jun 12 (IPS) - In the wake of the Haditha massacre, reports of another atrocity have surfaced in which U.S. troops killed two women in Samarra, and then attempted to hide evidence of their responsibility.
Among the innumerable such cases people speak of, this one too has now come to light.
According to an earlier account, Nabiha Nisaif Jassim, a 35-year-old mother of two, was killed in firing along with her 57-year-old cousin Saliha Mohammed Hassan on May 30 when they were being transported to Samarra General Hospital for Nabiha to give birth.
What was not reported, according to an Iraqi human rights investigator who spoke with IPS on condition of anonymity, was that both women were shot in the back of the head by U.S. snipers.
"I investigated this incident myself, and both of these women were shot from behind," said the investigator. "Nabiha's brains were splattered on her brother who was driving the car, since she was in the back seat."
The U.S. military said soldiers fired on the car after it entered a "clearly marked prohibited area near an observation post" after failing to stop despite "repeated visual and auditory warnings." The U.S. military said in a statement that "shots were fired to disable the vehicle."
The brother of the pregnant woman, Redam Nisaif Jassim, who was driving the car, told IPS that he neither saw nor heard any warnings by the U.S. military. Two men who witnessed the incident from a nearby home also said they saw no signs of any warning.
"These kinds of killings by the Americans happen daily in Iraq," said Jassim, "They gave no warning to us before killing my cousin and sister. Of course we know they have no respect for the lives of Iraqis."
The U.S. military claims the incident is being investigated.
The Haditha slaughter in which 24 Iraqis were killed is under investigation for the incident itself, and further for the cover-up, since the initial report given by the Marine Corps stated only that 15 civilian deaths were caused by a roadside bomb and fighting with insurgents.
In this case too, all signs point to a cover-up. "The area where they were killed by the Americans was completely unmarked," the human rights investigator told IPS. A warning sign at the place was put up after the two women were killed, he said.
Like the Haditha massacre, this incident too should be investigated both for the killing and the cover-up, he said.
According to the investigator, the U.S. troops who killed the two women made no attempt to assist them after the shooting.
The next day Redam Jassim was summoned to a local police station. "The Americans offered me 5,000 dollars, and told me it wasn't compensation but because of tradition," Jassim told IPS. The U.S. military pays usually 2,500 dollars compensation for killing an Iraqi. Jassim says he refused the payment.
The U.S. military recently announced in a Defence Department report provided to Congress that it paid out 19 million dollars in compensation to Iraqis last year -- half of which paid out by Marines in al-Anbar province west of Baghdad.
The military claimed the amount was paid in 600 separate incidents, but it is common knowledge in Iraq that the usual payout for a non-combat civilian death is 2,500 dollars.
A payment of 19 million dollars compensation at 2,500 dollars a person would suggest such killings in thousands.
Jassim told IPS and the human rights investigator that he was asked by the Americans' translator to sign a paper written in English. The family and their relatives live in a village called al-Muta'assim, a 40-minute drive from the main hospital in Samarra.. Most people there, like the Jassims, neither speak nor read English.
After he signed the paper, Jassim was offered 2,500 dollars by U.S. soldiers, which he again refused.
"It is clear the Americans tried to cheat him as well as cover up their tracks at the same time," the investigator told IPS. "Like in Haditha, this incident, along with so many others we cannot keep track of, requires a truly independent investigation, rather than one by the U.S. military."
Phone calls and emails to the U.S.. military spokesperson in Baghdad have not been returned.
Copyright 2006 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
*****
REVOLUTION ONLINE
Box 3486, Merchandise Mart
Chicago, IL 60654
Tel: 773-227-4066
Fax: 773-227-4497
Web: http://www.rwor.org
- No. 51, June 18, 2006 -
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7. 'LEFT BEHIND:' THE VIDEO GAME
Training Youth as Christian Fascist Warriors
_________________________________________________________________________
http://www.rwor.org/a/051/left-behind-video-game.html
Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission--both a religious mission and a military mission--to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state--especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old.
-- From "The Purpose Driven Life Takers", one of a four-part series exposing the "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" video game (and its links to major mainstream Christian fascist leaders) by Jonathan Hutson, a Christian writer who has written important exposure on the Christian fascists at the web site Talk2Action, http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/5/29/195855/959.
The "Left Behind" empire (the books alone have sold 65 million copies) of books and movies are bloody, revenge-filled thrillers which, according to their website, takes inspiration from the book of Revelation in the Bible: at once, millions of people are suddenly sucked up to Heaven, and unbelievers are slaughtered in ways that would rival the goriest of slasher films: "Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped wide open down the middle... Christians have to drive carefully to avoid 'hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses.'" (From "What the 'Left Behind' Series Really Means," by Joe Baegant, at the website YuricaReport.com.) Now they have launched a video game, expected to drop in October, aimed at training youth in the bloody annihilation of "unbelievers."
The game's website brags that its players can "conduct physical & spiritual warfare...using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world... Control more than 30 unit types--from Prayer Warrior and Hellraiser to Spies, Special Forces and Battle Tanks!"
Screen shots of the game show Christian warriors in full battle gear, patrolling the streets of New York battling for souls against the forces of evil--the "Peacekeepers." Hutson reports that the mission of these warriors is to force everyone else to either convert, and line up with the forces of good (the "Tribulation Force") or be killed, with their bodies left to rot in the streets. The game's website notes that killing unbelievers will cause gamers to lose "spirit points"--however, a quick post-bloodbath "prayer" session will rack those points right back up. The game shouts, "Praise the Lord!" every time an unbeliever is blasted away. Gamers can also switch to embody the spirit of the "AntiChrist" and literally devour fundamentalist Christians, providing further ammunition for the game's revenge fantasies.
Many of the Left Behind Games' advisory board members are major businessmen and marketers, who are planning to target megachurches and youth pastors: there are plans to distribute 1 million free copies to churches, and to market to mainstream gaming magazines. (Reviews on gaming websites show an eerie refusal to condemn the concept of a game designed to train teenagers in holy war.) Its designers have put effort into making this game as slick and well-designed as possible: The advisory board for Left Behind Games also includes the current director of sales for Microsoft Xbox; a former VP at Atari; and the senior vice president for a division of AOL Time Warner. Mark Carver, the executive director for Purpose Driven, the training arm of Rick Warren's megachurch in California, sat on the board until he suddenly resigned on June 6, after Hutson's series of articles had focused attention on his role. Purpose Driven then began trying to disassociate themselves and Warren from the game; in response, Hutson wrote that it was highly unlikely Warren was unaware of a project to develop the "biggest Christian video game in history" and asked, "Do we think that Left Behind invoked the name brand of Mr. Warren's Purpose Driven Church without his permission?" Hutson wrote:
"Now the organizations are making a public relations retreat, taking brisk, small steps, and making little noise about it, while... still refusing to condemn the gory game that glorifies violence and lets children strategize how to kill in the name of Christ, or the AntiChrist. Will [Warren] outright condemn the game and lead a boycott of any mega-churches and chain stores that plan to distribute it?"
In his articles, Hutson reveals one very telling feature of the game: it's no accident that the legions of ambulances zipping around in "Eternal Forces" do not have crosses or stars on their roofs, but are emblazoned with a big black "911": "...as if to say, We are living in the End Times, and Muslims are among the kinds of infidels whom you should fear, whom you should be prepared to kill for your cause."
Copyright 2006 Revolution Online
*****
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8. CONVICTED NUCLEAR SMUGGLER TO PAKISTAN ASHER KARNI LINKED
TO CONVICTED GOP LOBBYIST JACK ABRAMOFF
_________________________________________________________________________
WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
"From Deep Inside the Washington Beltway"
June 13, 2006
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com
By Wayne Madsen
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- WMR has learned from informed sources of a link between those who "outed" CIA counter-proliferation covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson and her Brewster Jennings & Associates cover firm and convicted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The link centers around convicted Israeli-South African nuclear components smuggler Asher Karni, a former officer in the Israeli Defense Force and Orthodox Jew who illegally smuggled 66 U.S.-made triggered spark gap nuclear detonators, via Cape Town, South Africa, where his company was located, to the Pakistan-based network of Abdul Qadeer ("A Q") Khan, a major target of Plame Wilson's CIA team. The A Q Khan network sold nuclear materials to Libya, North Korea, and most importantly, Iran. Karni's end-user client for the nuclear triggers in Pakistan was Humayun Khan's import-export Pakland Corp. Humayun Khan is no relation to A Q Khan.
In a inexplicable development, after his arrest in Denver on Jan. 1, 2004, Karni was granted, over federal prosecutors' objections, $100,000 bail by US District Judge for the District of Columbia Thomas Hogan. The government did not appeal Hogan's bail decision and Karni was released to the custody of the Hebrew Sheltering Home in Silver Spring, Maryland. After pleading guilty to smuggling charges, Karni was sentenced on August 4, 2005 to three years in prison by US Judge Ricardo Urbina. Karni's Turkish Jewish intermediary for the procurement of the nuclear triggers, Zeki Bilmen, owner of Giza Technologies of Secaucus, New Jersey, apparently died under suspicious circumstances in 2004 after Karni's arrest by Federal agents. However, Giza Technologies remains in operation to this day.
WMR has learned of a link between Karni and Abramoff. Rabbi Herzel Kranz, the head of the Hebrew Sheltering Home in Silver Spring where Karni was housed after his bail, is also a colleague of Abramoff's. The January 12, 2006 issue of The Forward contained an article citing praise of Abramoff by Kranz. At the time, Abramoff had just pleaded guilty to federal fraud and racketeering charges. Kranz praised Abramoff for donating to Jewish projects and, referring to Abramoff's conviction, said, "people make mistakes."
The Turkish nexus of the Karni-Bilmen-Humayun/A Q Khan smuggling network was of primary interest to both the CIA and FBI. It is also noteworthy that Judge Hogan, who dealt with the Karni case, was also the judge who ordered the FBI raid of Louisiana Democratic Representative William Jefferson's congressional office. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who has reportedly been under investigation for receiving Turkish campaign donations and his ties to Abramoff, strongly condemned the FBI raid of Jefferson's office. After Hastert's protests, the Justice Department leaked word to the media that the Abramoff scandal extended to include Hastert. Essentially, Abramoff money was being used by the Justice Department as a weapon against Bush administration critics. WMR has also learned that Abramoff's money was also used to blackmail other members of Congress who were investigating the Israeli connection to nuclear smuggling and the A Q Khan network.
There is also evidence that some of the highly classified CIA information convicted Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin passed through American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) staffers Steve Rosen and Keith Weisman to Israeli agents attached to the Israeli embassy in Washington dealt with Iranian nuclear development and that CIA sensitive sources and methods not disclosed by the outing of Plame Wilson/Brewster Jennings were discovered in the leak of the CIA documents to AIPAC and the Israelis.
In any case, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is now dealing with a much larger case with the same limited budget and relatively small staff of prosecutors and FBI agents, in addition to a Justice Department that is dangerously using evidence gathered in the Abramoff money and influence-peddling probe as a political weapon against GOP opponents of Bush-Cheney policies. It is clear that the Justice Department is being politically manipulated and one effect of the high-level interference is likely today's early morning announcement that Fitzgerald has decided that he does not plan to indict Karl Rove, one of the chief suspects in the Plame/CIA leak.
WMR is pursuing additional angles in this case.
Copyright 2006 Wayne Madsen Report. All rights reserved.
*****
_________________________________________________________________________
9. AFGHAN PROVINCE TO PROVIDE ONE-THIRD OF WORLD'S HEROIN
_________________________________________________________________________
THE GUARDIAN
World: Afghanistan
Wednesday June 14, 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1796794,00.html
Declan Walsh in Kabul
Poppy harvest to double in British-patrolled area. £1.1bn from west since 2001 fails to stop trade
The Afghanistan province being patrolled by British troops will produce at least a third of the world's heroin this year, according to drug experts who are forecasting a record harvest that will be an embarrassment for the western-funded war on narcotics.
British officials are bracing themselves for the result of an annual UN poppy survey due later this summer. Early indications show an increase on Helmand's 1999 record of 45,000 hectares (112,500 acres) and a near-doubling of last year's crop.
"It's going to be massive," said one British drugs official. "My guess is it's going to be the biggest ever."
Helmand's bumper harvest highlights the failure of western counter-narcotics efforts that have cost at least $2bn (£1.1bn) since 2001. It could undo progress made last year, when poppy cultivation dropped 21% after a call for a "jihad" on drugs by the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.
It spells particularly bad news for Britain, which is leading the anti-narcotics campaign and has deployed 3,300 soldiers to the lawless province. Afghanistan produces almost 90% of the world's heroin, with about a third coming from Helmand. Drug experts say the province is as central to Afghanistan's illegal economy as California is to America's legal one. "If you took Helmand out of the picture, Afghanistan would fall from the world's top poppy grower to second or third place," said one US official.
British and American officials cannot resort to the tactics of the Taliban, which slashed poppy cultivation in 2001 by threatening to shoot farmers. But western efforts using less violent methods, such as encouraging farmers to grow legal crops, have proved fruitless.
The smuggling kingpins who control the £1.5bn trade have become rich, powerful and apparently untouchable. "Until Karzai arrests and jails one big dealer, people will not believe the central government is behind this drive," said a former American anti-narcotics contractor.
The most damaging allegations surround the minister charged with counter-narcotics, Muhammad Daud. Several western officials claim General Daud, a former Tajik warlord, has historical and family links to smuggling.
He denies the allegations. "It is very shameful for a big country with such a good reputation to make allegations like this," he said.
American congressmen are increasing the pressure to start poppy eradication with crop-spraying planes - a controversial tactic opposed by British and Afghan officials, who say it would be disastrous. "It could drive farmers into the hands of the insurgents," said one.
Britain's main enemy, the Taliban, has developed close links to drugs smugglers. On Sunday a British soldier, named as Captain Jim Philippson, became the first combat fatality in Helmand after a battle with suspected Taliban forces.
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
*****
_________________________________________________________________________
10. MYSTERY PLANES GETTING AROUND
_________________________________________________________________________
WIRED NEWS
27B Stroke 6
June 12, 2006
http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/
by Kevin Poulsen
A mysterious Delaware company's single-engine light aircraft may soon be circling the sky near you.
Last year, residents of Lodi, California noticed a tiny Cessna 182 moving in slow circles over their small town, just circling and circling for a least month.
The Lodi News-Sentinel got a hold of a picture of the mystery plane, checked its tail number with the FAA and traced it to the Northwest Aircraft Leasing Corp. in Newark, Delaware. The listed address, reporters found, was a mail drop.
The plane was spotted shortly after the FBI moved in on suspected al Qaeda associates living in the area.
By then, another 182 had already been sighted making regular appearances over Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington DC, where it was also quietly circling like a vulture. That piqued the interest of nearby scanner enthusiasts, because until then the FBI favored the Cessna 172.
One of the monitors finally snagged the tail number last week, N11130, and it also comes back to Northwest.
There's no phone listing for Northwest Aircraft Leasing in Newark, Delaware. Public records show only that the company was incorporated in 1996.
The CIA is known to erect false corporate fronts for its own private air force used to spirits terror suspects between countries for extra-legal "rendition."
In this case, the more likely explanation is that the FBI is using the Delaware identity for its new generation of spy planes, equipped with sophisticated optics to watch people on the ground. In 2003, the Bureau admitted to flying a tricked-out 182 over several communities near Indianapolis to keep tabs on customers of internet cafes and copy shops.
Copyright 2006, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
*****
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11. THE CONTINUING AMERICAN MASSACRE
_________________________________________________________________________
By Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Col. Writ. 6/2/06]
Source: Afrikan Frontline Network, nattyreb@comcast.net
- Sunday, 11 June 2006 -
In the last few days the name Haditha has emerged as a place of death, carnage, mass murder, and of the latest American massacre.
The news that U.S. soldiers went into the Sunni town and, after attacked by i.e.d.s (improvised explosive devices), proceeded to slaughter several dozen men, women, and children -- all of whom were unarmed Iraqi civilians -- is going around the world at the speed of light.
The Haditha Massacre happened over 6 months ago (in late November, 2005) and the Army's response is -- sensitivity training.
We have come a long way from the days of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, where U.S. Army troops slaughtered hundreds of defenseless villagers; old men, women, babies -- even animals.
Instead of hundreds, it's now dozens.
That's a kind of progress, isn't it?
And yet, massacres have a way of clarifying things; of showing us the naked, deadly truths that we all seem to ignore when immersed in the fog of war.
My Lai revealed that the U.S. didn't go to Vietnam to "save" them from communism; they went to force them to their knees, to bow to their new colonial masters. Americans went because the French were exhausted after their losses at a place called Dien Bien Phu, and wanted to replace them.
Haditha, although smaller in scale, is also a clarity bursting through fog; the U.S. didn't go to Iraq to "liberate" them from a brutal dictatorship. They came to install their own dictator -- one who answered to them.
But, to be honest, the entire war was a massacre. According to the British medical journal, The Lancet, some 100,000 Iraqis were killed by U.S. bombing and military action. The Lancet's estimate is thought to be quite conservative.
What unites these two wars, despite the distance of time and space, is the central theme of race. Vietnamese, called "gooks" by American soldiers, were seen as less than human. Iraqis, as Arabs, are seen as "wogs" by the British, and "sand niggers" by Americans.
Haditha, for all of its horror, pain, and loss, is but the tip of the iceberg. The U.S. occupation is an act of violence, that draws on the hated history of colonialism.
Since the Iraq invasion, we have seen disaster after disaster after disaster. Haditha is but an echo of Abu Ghraib, both gifts of the same sadistic Santa Claus, whose bag is filled to the brim, with poison.
Copyright 2006 Mumia Abu-Jamal. All rights reserved.
Mr. Jamal's new work, WE WANT FREEDOM: A Life in the Black Panther Party, is now available from South End Press, Cambridge, MA. (http://www.southendpress.org).
Check out Mumia's NEW book: "Faith of Our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People": http://www.africanworld.com.
These are VERY SERIOUS TIMES for political activists in this country and around the world. Get full details and keep updated by reading ACTION ALERTS!! at http://www.mumia.org and http://www.movenet.org.
To download Mp3's of Mumia's commentaries visit http://www.prisonradio.org or http://www.fsrn.org
The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!
CHECK http://www.mumia.org FOR IMPORTANT ACTION ALERTS!
PLEASE CONTACT: International Concerned Family & Friends of MAJ; P.O. Box 19709; Philadelphia, PA 19143; Tel: 215-476-8812; Fax: 215-476-6180: E-mail: icffmaj@aol.com AND OFFER YOUR SERVICES!
Send our brotha some LOVE and LIGHT at:
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WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM CAN NOT REST!!
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- AFIB No. 729, June 11, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
In retrospect, Phoenix proved a seminal experience for the U.S. intelligence community, combining both physical and psychological techniques in an extreme method that would serve as a model for later counterinsurgency training in South and Central America. In 1965-66, Army Intelligence launched Project X, which was designed, according to a confidential Pentagon memo, "to develop an exportable foreign intelligence package to provide counterinsurgency techniques learned in Vietnam to Latin American countries." ... For the next quarter of a century, the Army would transmit these extreme tactics, by both direct training and mailings of manuals, to the armies of at least ten Latin American nations. By the mid-1980s, counterguerrilla operations in Colombia and Central America would thus bear an eerie but explicable resemblance to South Vietnam. -- Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War On Terror [New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006] p. 71.
Contents: Number 729
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 731/June 18, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 730/June 14, 2006
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_________________________________________________________________________
1. FBI CONFIDENTIAL INFORMANT ALSO SAID TO BE PROVOCATEUR
_________________________________________________________________________
THE RAW STORY
Top Stories
Thursday, June 8, 2006
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/FBI_confidential_informant_also_said_to_0608.html
Jennifer Van Bergen
According to activists from Des Moines, Philadelphia, Miami, Sacramento, and other locations, a young woman named "Anna" allegedly infiltrated peace and justice rallies and anarchist meetings, and even attempted to join protests against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) ahead of the DNC's national convention last year as a paid FBI confidential "informant." Activists say that she has tried to provoke conflict at various advocacy events and violent incidents with police to get people arrested. In other words, Anna is not just an informant, she may be a provocateur.
Although she is known among activist groups as either Anna Davies or Anna Davidson, others know her as Grai Damiani. She focuses her efforts largely on "anarchist" groups.
The McDavid Case
In January 2006, Eric McDavid, Lauren Weiner, and Zachary Jenson were arrested in California and charged with knowingly conspiring to use fire or explosives to damage property. Their arrest was the direct result of work by Anna, who was "deeply embedded within the subjects' cell," according to FBI documents.
The FBI affidavit in support of the complaint against the three defendants states that they planned on their own to engage in "direct action" -- which the FBI agent equated with criminal activity -- apparently without Anna's input or guidance. The direct action involved bombing one or several locations in California.
However, McDavid's attorney, Mark Reichel, states that Anna was always pushing McDavid to do something criminal, taught the three how to make the bombs, supervised their activities, and repeatedly threatened to leave them if they didn't start doing "something."
McDavid allegedly wanted to target banks, commercial trucks, mountaintop removal projects in West Virginia, Communist party office, and the U.S. Forest Service Institute of Forest Genetics in California, according to the affidavit.
The affidavit, which was written by FBI Special Agent Nasson Walker, shows that the agency has identified the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) as "a recognized eco-terrorist group," which Walker states has been involved in over $100 million dollars worth of damage since 1997. Walker further notes that: "Environmental extremists under the ELF banner have been known to use arson and/or explosives to damage or destroy or attempt to damage or destroy government, commercial, and residential facilities." Walker also states that "ELF adherents share a strong philosophical connection to the anarchist movement," which he notes "seeks to end the current system of government, economy and replace them with systems characterized by a lack of authoritarian/hierarchical relationships." Walker states that all three of the defendants are anarchists.
The FBI claims that Anna has "provided information that has been utilized in at least twelve separate anarchist cases" and that her "information has proved accurate and reliable."
But just who is Anna and what makes her reliable?
Organization of American States (OAS) Protests
In June of last year, according to witnesses, Anna showed up in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida for an anti-OAS protest which drew approximately 1200 people. Wearing a shirt with a red cross on it and carrying a bag with the same logo, she appeared on the day the protests began and identified herself as a "medic" from California.
One protester who had become ill during the event was treated by Anna. "She was pushy," said Barbara Collins, a retired Miami resident who says Anna gave her Gatorade with water and then left. "She gave me that drink that made me sick, but later on she didn't seem that interested in treating me. She wanted to get back to the others." Collins was subsequently hospitalized for heat stroke.
Linda Belgrave, a sociology professor at University of Miami, who assisted Collins that day, had to go find Anna again when Barbara got worse. According to Belgrave, Anna told her she was "busy." Belgrave did not see Anna attending to any other person in need of medical attention. She was simply "hanging out" with the "kids."
Indeed, Anna was busy, according to other protesters at the OAS rally.
During the march to the rally where Collins fell ill, one Miami resident, who asked that her name not be used, heard people talking about doing a sit-in. Since the coalition had decided against sit-ins and had negotiated carefully with the police about routes and activities, she warned people individually not to participate in the sit-in. Most did not, but Ray Del Papa from Ft. Lauderdale subsequently saw Anna directing young people to sit down on the street directly in front of a line of police in riot gear. In describing what he saw, Del Papa motions with his arms to show how Anna instructed individuals to sit here and there. Del Papa felt that it was a "set-up," a "trap, similar to what the police did during the protests against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) in Miami in 2003."
The fences penned the protesters in completely except where the riot police were, which was exactly where Anna instructed the young people to do their sit-in, according to Del Papa.
"She knew they could get their heads bashed in," notes Mark Reichel, based on conversations with the activists. "If you saw their faces as well, you would understand that these people were not lying."
Under the Attorney General's Guidelines, the FBI and prosecutors are required to keep secret the identity of a confidential informant. However, Anna was seemingly "outed" last year by activists who recognized what they saw as disruptive and provocative tactics and posted pictures of her on the internet.
The allegations were later confirmed by Reichel, who identified the unnamed FBI confidential source cited in the January 2006 complaint affidavit for the McDavid case as Anna.
Reichel also viewed hundreds of hours of surveillance tapes of Anna and McDavid and his cohorts. He notes that Anna's forte is identifying "radical" young men and women and "getting them" to fall in love with her.
The FBI will not discuss Anna's status or the specifics of her training or operations but denies that informants are trained to provoke. In response to RAW STORY's queries about Anna, FBI media representative Karen Ernst said that "Sources are admonished not to provoke criminal activity."
"Sources operated by the FBI are closely monitored and the information received from them is corroborated through other investigative techniques."
Additionally, Ernst explains that the FBI corroborates information obtained from an informant "before charges are brought" against an individual. "Charges are brought when the totality of the evidence is sufficient for either a criminal complaint or indictment. Information from a source would never be the only evidence used to bring charges; other evidence would include recordings, surveillance video, results of witness testimony, etc.," adds Ernst.
Despite being outed, Anna continues to infiltrate groups and presently is living in a collective home with some young people in Iowa, according to Reichel.
Criminal Activity Plus Salary
According to the "Attorney General's Guidelines Regarding the Use of Confidential Informants" (AG Guidelines), a "Confidential Informant" or "CI" is "any individual who provides useful and credible information to [the FBI] regarding felonious criminal activities, and from whom the [FBI] expects or intends to obtain additional useful and credible information regarding such activities in the future."
The FBI conducts a "suitability determination" for each informant, which includes consideration of the candidate's age, affiliations, motivations, reliability, truthfulness, and criminal and drug history.
Every informant receives and must acknowledge her understanding of a written set of instructions, which are reviewed by an agent with the CI. The CI is not allowed to engage in criminal activity without authorization. A CI who is authorized to engage in "Tier 1 Otherwise Illegal Activity" -- which includes involvement with violent activities by other persons, corrupt conduct by officials, and trafficking of controlled substances -- becomes a "High Level Confidential Informant."
Given Anna's involvement in the McDavid case, where she was involved in allegedly planning violent activities, she became a High Level CI.
According to Ernst, all sources are operated in accordance with the Attorney General's Guidelines. Sources are required to meet on a regular basis with an agent who provides them guidance and instructions.
Yet in a scathing report released by the Department of Justice in September of last year, DOJ inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, found "that FBI agents violated procedures in 87 percent of the cases, including some in which informants allegedly engaged in illegal activity without proper oversight or permission."
As for Anna, she receives about $37,500 a year, plus expenses, for her work. In the McDavid case, for example, in addition to her salary, the FBI paid for Anna to rent a house in California, paid for helicopter surveillance at her behest, and ostensibly also paid for the audio and video surveillance rigged in the rental house.
Are there other Annas?
Although the FBI states that it does not target lawful activity or activity protected by the First Amendment, in Florida alone, groups advocating against the invasion of Iraq, the PATRIOT Act, the OAS, and the FTAA have all been infiltrated, according to participants -- who cannot prove that the suspicious persons were infiltrators or informants. But documents released last year show that a counter-recruitment meeting at the Quaker House in Lake Worth, Florida was infiltrated by the Department of Defense. And the revelations about Anna, who participated in at least two of the major protests in Florida, further confirm activists' fears.
While officials have claimed that anarchists advocate violence, Fred Frost, President of the Florida AFL-CIO, stated in 2004 at public hearings after the FTAA demonstrations that anarchists "may look different from you and me, but they are some of the nicest, most peaceful people I've ever met, helping everyone -- I have a great deal of respect for them."
None of the above-mentioned peace and justice groups advocates violence; all advocate using peaceful and lawful means of expression.
Jennifer Van Bergen is a freelance journalist with a law degree. Her book "The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America" is available on Amazon. Her book "Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious" will be out next year. She can be reached at jvbxyz@earthlink.net.
Copyright 2006 Raw Story Media, Inc. All rights reserved.
*****
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- Saturday, 10 June 2006 -
_________________________________________________________________________
2. TORTURED FRAGMENTS OF HISTORY
Veil of secrecy surrounding methods of interrogation and torture
_________________________________________________________________________
by Stan Winer
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=WIN20060610&articleId=2622
In April 2004, the world was momentarily shocked by televised photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked, posed in contorted positions, and visibly suffering humiliating abuse while amused American soldiers stood by. Responsibility for these acts of psychological torture has largely been confined to the lowest ranks and kept close to Abu Ghraib itself. Official statements attributed the practice to a temporary breakdown in "military discipline", thus diverting any suspicion that the evidence of psychological torture as paraded before our eyes in the Abu Ghraib snapshots is most likely the product of intelligence policies shaped in design and application over a long period of time.
The Abu Ghraib scandal did, however, open a floodgate of news and information leaks about the existence of a mini-gulag of prisons the CIA and US Army Intelligence had set up in Afghanistan, on aircraft carriers, in remote places like the Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia, and in the prisons of torture-friendly allies.(1) An official inquiry disclosed that the US Army specifically allowed the CIA to house "ghost detainees" who were unidentified and unaccounted for in Abu Ghraib, thus encouraging violations of reporting and monitoring requirements under the Geneva Conventions.(2)
What the official inquiry studiously avoided telling us were the actual reasons why such obsessive secrecy was deemed necessary in the first place. But clearly, such facilities are placed outside the rule of law. They are not subject to review of the manner in which they function, the interrogation methods used, and the general conditions prevailing there. Representatives of the International Red Cross, are denied access to the facilities; nobody knows how many detainees are held there, who the detainees are, where they come from, which authority was responsible for their capture or arrest, who conducted the interrogations, or whether the interrogators were authorised to do so.
It is reasonable to assume that, once a prisoner of war is captured, the captor's immediate objective would be to obtain from the prisoner quick information for tactical operations such as strikes, counter-strikes or further arrests. The infliction of physical pain is probably the quickest method of obtaining information, the usefulness of which is usually short-lived due to the changing and changeable nature of battlefield conditions. So why then the purpose of protracted psychological torture, which is comparatively slower at producing results and seemingly more benign than physical methods?
The obsessive veil of secrecy surrounding such methods means that military personnel are themselves largely unaware of how their individual actions fit into the overall picture. Others know exactly what they are doing, but keep quiet because they also know that what they are doing is criminal. The Official Secrets Act also ensures that lips remain tightly sealed. Above all, a perceived need to protect "the national interest" combines with censorship to retain a wall of silence around the subject.
A notable exception occurred, however, several years ago during the mammoth trial in South Africa of alleged war criminal Brigadier Wouter Basson, a South African Army chemical and biological warfare specialist.(3) The trial provided rare glimpses into the horrors that can and did evidently occur in circumstances of extreme secrecy and geographical isolation no less pervasive and extreme as those prevailing currently in America's gulag of secret prisons.
Evidence presented at Basson's trial lifted the lid on some bizarre events taking place in the 1970s and 1980s at an airfield and forward military base named Fort Rev, situated at Ondangwa in the former South West Africa, (now Namibia). Fort Rev was used by 5 Reconnaissance Regiment and the other special forces regiments as an operational base for launching counter-insurgency operations into Angola and areas of Owamboland. Inside the base, immediately adjacent to the airfield, was a secret torture and interrogation centre where attempts, not always successful, were made to "turn" or "convert" captured guerrillas into so-named "pseudo operators" for deployment in highly sensitive, covert deception operations. Hence the name Fort Rev, meaning "reversal". Neurophysiologists and behavioural scientists have another phrase for it: transmarginal inhibition or TMI -- a state of behavioral collapse induced by physical and emotional stress prior to inducing new patterns of actions and beliefs. Successful application of this technique, sometimes referred to pejoratively as "brainwashing", requires psychological torturers to have total control of the environment. Existing mental programming can then be replaced with new patterns of thinking and behavior. The same results can be obtained in contemporary psychiatric treatment by electric shock treatments and even by purposely lowering a patient's blood sugar level with insulin injections.(4)
The Namibian deception operations, under the tutelage of battle hardened former Rhodesian special forces operators, had to be kept secret at any cost. If the operations were successful, pseudo gangs consisting of turned guerrillas posing as genuine freedom fighters would be infiltrated back into the field of operations where they would in turn capture more insurgents. Some of these so-called "high value targets", would then also be turned at Fort Rev, others being useful only as a source of information. But, having served that purpose, or having resisted turning, they then presented a major security risk, because they would have picked up at least some insight into the manner and methods of pseudo operations, and this could immediately compromise the secrecy of the entire pseudo operations programme. So they could not be processed through normal channels and imprisoned in a central holding facility from which word might leak to the outside world.
The torturers and interrogators at Fort Rev got around this small problem by simply killing off survivors of interrogation. "Redundant" prisoners were disposed of without trace after being drugged and their bodies dumped into the Atlantic Ocean from an aircraft. The doomed prisoners, before being loaded onto an aircraft and dumped 100 miles out to sea, were first injected with powerful muscle relaxants which had the effect of paralysing the victim whilst leaving his mind fully conscious. An anaesthetic drug was also used, having the effect of causing hallucinations.(5)
The practise of dropping prisoners' bodies from aircraft, according to evidence presented at the trial of Brigadier Basson, was developed in the late 1970s during joint operations between Rhodesian and South African special forces. One witness, a former French Foreign Legionnaire and member of the Rhodesian counter-insurgency unit known as the Selous Scouts, also described how Basson allegedly injected captured freedom fighters with poison during a flight over Mozambique territory. He said these captives were then thrown alive from an airplane in 1979. The victims were five guerrillas believed to have been from the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). According to the witness, who could not be named for reasons of personal safety, said that before the poisoned, unconscious men were thrown from the plane, they were dressed in camouflage uniforms and supplied with guns and false papers. They were then sprinkled with an unknown powdery substance, which he believed was poison or some kind of lethal chemical agent. He believed the powdery agent was meant to contaminate other freedom fighters or sympathisers who might happen upon the bodies.
The modus operandi of the Selous Scouts was exemplified in a separate incident in February 1980, when political campaigning was approaching a climax in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia's first free election. Several churches became the targets of terrorist bombs. A well-orchestrated Press campaign swiftly attributed the bombings to "communist atheists" -- an apparent reference to the national liberation movement. Then, in what turned out to be the last in a series of explosions, somebody blew himself up when the bomb he was planting exploded prematurely. Papers found on his body identified him as a highly decorated member of the Selous Scouts. The Rhodesians are also suspected to have used pseudo operators to murder more than 30 missionaries in remote districts, were many freedom fighters had been educated at mission stations. The murders were attributed falsely to the liberation movement. But Catholic Bishop Donald Lamont, before he was imprisoned for a year, stripped of his Rhodesian citizenship and finally expelled from the country, had no doubts about who was really responsible for the killings. "If it were the objective of the guerrillas to kill missionaries, there would not be one of us left alive."(6)
The Rhodesians had extensive experience in counter-insurgency doctrine dating back to 1956 when British Commonwealth forces in Malaya had included the Rhodesian African Rifles, and the Rhodesians had also modelled their "pseudo gangs" along the lines of the British counter-insurgency strategy during the 1950s Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. The Americans, for their part, later adapted their own version of this doctrine in Vietnam.(7)
Such methods bore a striking resemblance to the ideas of the Organisation de l'Armee Secrete (OAS) which operated in Algeria during the late 1950s. The OAS was made up of embittered right-wing French army officers and fanatical Algerians of European descent trying to retain Algeria under French colonial control. In their ranks were covert action specialists working for the French army's 5th (Psychological Action) Bureau, and officers commanding French Foreign Legion and paratroop units in Algeria. Communist guerrilla warfare, according to them, did not have the objective of capturing strategic territory as in conventional warfare, but created an extended military battlefield that included all aspects of civil society, especially the psychological and ideological spheres. Having "identified" the enemy's techniques, the proponents of "counter-terrorism" then sought to neutralise the enemy by adopting the enemy's "own" methods and turning them against the enemy. Hence the coming into being of a ruthless and sophisticated ensemble of psychological techniques. The objective was to create a climate of tension, anxiety and insecurity, thereby conditioning the masses to accept State authority while alienating the masses from the Algerian liberation movement.(8)
The collapse of the OAS came about after a failed 1958 military revolt in Algiers and a "general's putsch" in April 1961 which brought down the French government and threatened the political survival of its Gaullist successor, the Fifth Republic. Having failed to secure the "moral regeneration" of France many of its members were forced to flee abroad, notably to Argentina and also to Portugal where Lisbon became their strategic centre with official encouragement from the Portuguese secret police. In exchange for asylum and other incentives, they helped train foreign counter-insurgency and parallel police units forming the embryo of future "counter-terrorist" groups deployed around the world under the tutelage of OAS fugitives.(9)
By 1984 one French veteran of Indo-China and many African campaigns, the notorious Bob Denard, virtually controlled the Comoros islands together with a band of French mercenaries. The Comoros rapidly became a secret staging post funnelling arms from South Africa to the rebel Renamo movement in Mozambique. Denard also made it possible for South Africa to build and operate a sophisticated electronic eavesdropping facility at Itsandra on Grande Comore island. From here Pretoria could monitor both maritime movements in the Mozambique Channel and ANC radio communications in neighbouring Tanzania.(10)
From Lisbon former OAS members plotted to destabilise and destroy national liberation movements throughout Africa and their exploits galvanised rightwing extremists everywhere. An internal report written by one former OAS member was captured in the mid-1970s by leftist officers of the Armed Forces Movement in Lisbon. The captured document, shown to journalists, endorsed bluntly a "strategy of tension" that would "work on public opinion and promote chaos in order to later raise up a defender of the citizens against the disintegration provoked by subversion and terrorism". As one seasoned cold warrior put it: "When you've got the masses by the balls, their hearts and minds follow."
In 1994, such ideas found resonance in the run-up to South Africa's first democratic elections. The former apartheid regime -- then part of a transitional government -- made much of wooing black voters on a platform proclaiming "black leaders have failed to halt the continuing violence", which was blamed by white politicians on "warring black factions". The gunmen involved in many of the violent clashes taking place at the time, used Soviet-made AK-47 rifles and Makarov pistols to create the impression that liberation movement "terrorists" were responsible, and police reports always blamed the ANC.
As amnesty applicants would later confess to the South African Truth Commission, the SA Police diverted taxpayers' money to a police-run strategic deception unit called Stratcom. Former Stratcom unit head Vic McPherson disclosed to the Truth Commission that more than 40 undercover police agents, paid informers, unwitting "sources" and "friendly" journalists throughout the South African mainstream media had participated in Stratcom projects during the late 1980s. According to former security police death-squad commander Colonel Eugene de Kock, presently serving a life sentence for multiple murders, his activities in Stratcom during the 1980s included violent attacks on white people by "turned" freedom fighters, which were then falsely attributed by elements of the Press to left-wing activists. The intention was to manipulate South African public opinion to accept that only elements of the former regime, if reinstated, could defend the masses from chaos, anarchy and terrorism.(11)
In the absence of digital imaging technology of the kind evidenced at Abu Ghraib, one can only speculate about the full extent to which brainwashing or the "turning" of prisoners was practised for many years in South Africa, or during France's battle for Algiers in the 1950s, Britain's suppression of independence movements in Kenya and Malaya in the 1960s, Argentina's dirty war, Britain's Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970 and 1980s, and countless other regional conflicts. Whatever happened then, and whatever the true activities currently taking place in America's gulag of secret prisons, it is certainly the case that extreme secrecy provides an ideal environment for the application of psychological torture techniques aimed at "converting" prisoners of war into pseudo operators.
There remains wide public ignorance and a studied avoidance of this unsettling subject. Few people have been able to fit together the fragments of history and grasp the larger picture. Others simply don't want to know. The practice of psychological torture, never fully acknowledged, is thus allowed to persist inside the secret services as the product of intelligence strategies that have probably been standard practice for at least half-a-century or more. Abu Ghraib may be just the tip of an iceberg.
South African-based journalist Stan Winer is author of the book Between the Lies: Rise of the media-military-industrial complex, London: Southern Universities Press, 2004. Free PDF download available at http://www.coldtype.net/archives.html)
NOTES & REFERENCES
(1) For a list of US detention sites see http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/media/2004_alerts/0617.htm.
(2) For many years the Israeli secret services took this one step further by actually operating a "ghost prison" for political detainees. Code-named Facility 1391, this secret prison intended for "special cases" operated in Israel for many years within the walls of a secret army base, distant from the eyes of the Press and the public, and without being declared a detention facility, as required by statute. See http://www.icj-sweden.org/Facility1391.pdf.
(3) The complete trial record of Wouter Basson is available at http://ccrweb.ccr.uct.ac.za/archive/cbw/cbw_index.html. All charges against Basson were eventually withdrawn by the State after a marathon 30-month trial in the Pretoria High Court three years ago. The court ruled that it had no jurisdiction in respect of crimes committed in South West Africa -- or Namibia as it is now named. An appeal court later overturned the decision on the basis that South West Africa was in fact a South African colony during the apartheid era. It was illegally occupied and administered by the former South African regime. The Directorate of Public Prosecutions then decided last year not to reopen the case against of Basson because of the legal principle of double jeopardy, which means in effect that an alleged perpetrator cannot be tried twice on the same charges. For subsequent developments see Stan Winer essay at http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.06/Essays.06/0506.Reader5.pdf.
(4) The technique was discovered by Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov (see bibliography below) who identified TMI in the early 1900's. His work with animals is said to have opened the door to further investigations with humans. The ways to achieve conversion through TMI are many and varied, but the usual first step in brainwashing is to work on the emotions of an individual or group until they reach an abnormal level of anger, fear, excitement or nervous tension. The progressive result of this mental condition is to impair judgement and increase suggestibility. The more this condition can be maintained or intensified, the more it compounds, leading to total behavioural conversion.
(6) David Martin & Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe, London: Faber 1981, p.283 Martin and Johnson).
(7) On Rhodesian pseudo-gangs see: Martin & Johnson, op cit, pp. 110-11; Ken Flower, Serving Secretly: An intelligence chief on record, London: John Murray 1987, pp. 114-5. On the Rhodesians in Malaya see Christopher Owen, The Rhodesian African Rifles, London: Leo Cooper, 1970. On the origin of "pseudo gangs" in Kenya see Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-gangs, London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960. On British counter-insurgency doctrine generally see Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping, London: Faber, 1971. On Vietnam see Larry Cable, Conflict of Myths: The Development of American Counter-Insurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War, New York: New York University Press 1986, p. 82.
(8) Interviews conducted by the author with officers of the Armed Forces Movement (AFM) in Lisbon after the 1975 socialist military coup in Portugal. Many incriminating documents, viewed by the author, were seized by the AFM from OAS fugitives operating in Lisbon.
(10) See D Kendo, "Comores: L'Ordre Mercenaire", Jeune Afrique, nos 1511/1512, December 1989; Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Madagascar, Comoros, Country Profile, 1989-90, London 1990, pp 32-36; EIU, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Comoros: Country Report No. 1, London 1990.
(11) The strategy was apparently revived three years ago when 22 seditious South African conspirators including three senior army officers who plotted to establish a rebel army of about 4 500 to overthrow the South African government and replace it with a military regime run entirely by white supremacists. The conspirators, currently on trial for murder, treason and terrorism, allegedly planned to unleash chaos in the country to cover the rebel army's movements while a 50-man death squad would eliminate "traitors" and blame the actions on black people. The rebel army, to "restore order", would then contrive a 10-day electricity blackout under cover of which airports would be closed, aircraft grounded, and arms depots and combat vehicles seized. A final stage would be the inauguration of a right-wing military government.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eysenck HJ The biological basis of personality, Springfield, IL: Thomas, (1967).
Pavlov, IP Lectures on Conditional Reflexes: The higher nervous activity (Behaviour) of animals, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1928.
Sargant, W The Battle for the Mind, London: Wm Heinemann, 1957.
Copyright Stan Winer and the Centre for Research on Globalisation 2006. For fair use only/pour usage equitable seulement.
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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Web: http://www.wsws.org/
E-Mail: editor@wsws.org
- Friday, 9 June 2006 -
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3. THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND THE KILLING OF ZARQAWI
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News & Analysis: Middle East: Iraq
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/zarq-j09.shtml
By Barry Grey
The Bush administration and the US media are going all out to portray the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a major victory for the American military and the recently installed government in Baghdad.
The attempt to parlay the death of the Islamist terrorist into a propaganda coup for the US and its proxy government in Baghdad is an obscene spectacle, combining cynicism and desperation.
Early Thursday morning, US time, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, flanked by Gen. George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, held a press conference in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone to announce that the Jordanian-born terrorist had been killed, along with five other people, in a US air attack on a "safe house" outside of Baqubah, a town northeast of Baghdad.
Maliki boasted that Zarqawi had been "terminated." A US military spokesman later acknowledged that among those killed by two 500-pound bombs dropped Wednesday evening were a woman and a child.
President Bush wasted no time in attempting to seize on the news to divert public attention from revelations of American massacres and, he hoped, staunch the sharp decline in his administration's approval ratings, largely the product of broad and growing popular opposition in the US to the war.
In remarks made Thursday morning from the White House, Bush declared that "justice" had been "delivered" to the "operational commander of the terrorist movement in Iraq." He praised the "courage and professionalism" of "the finest military in the world."
He went on to caution against any expectations that the death and destruction in Iraq would recede, or that American troops would be coming home any time soon. "Zarqawi is dead," he said, "but the difficult and necessary mission in Iraq continues. We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him." Warning of "tough days ahead," he demanded the "continued patience of the American people."
The Democrats quickly joined in hailing the killing of Zarqawi. Senator Joseph Biden, who has announced his intention to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, told CNN that the killing was "good news." He went on to praise the US military.
According to their own statements, US military and intelligence forces had been tracking Zarqawi for some time, having (presumably through torture) extracted from captured members of his group, Al Qaeda in Iraq, critical information about his movements. Why did they decide to move now? No doubt the timing of the attack was bound up with mounting signs of political crisis within the Bush administration and demoralization among US troops occupying Iraq.
Only a few days before, Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki was publicly denouncing the US military for a callous disregard for Iraqi life. Responding to the execution of 24 Iraqi civilians by US Marines in Haditha, Maliki called such atrocities a "daily phenomenon," and charged that the American forces "do not respect the Iraqi people.... They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion or a hunch."
As for Zarqawi, he was one of those shadowy figures, well known to US intelligence, whose real allegiance at any given time is difficult to pin down. A fanatical Sunni Muslim fundamentalist, he represented an extremely reactionary element within Iraq. To the extent that he was involved in the numerous atrocities laid at his feet by Washington, his role was to undermine the Iraqi resistance and incite sectarian civil war between the Sunnis and Shiites.
Zarqawi began his career as a jihadist, like Osama bin Laden and so many others who subsequently turned against the US, by traveling to Afghanistan, in early 1989, to join the US-backed mujahidin guerilla war against the Soviet military occupation.
Even before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration was vastly exaggerating Zarqawi's role in the country in order to justify its illegal intervention. In his now notorious speech before the United Nations Security Council in February of 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell singled out Zarqawi as the personification of an alliance between the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda--a claim which the Council on Foreign Relations in an article posted Thursday on its web site said, diplomatically avoiding the word "lie," was "later disproved."
As the Iraqi resistance grew in the aftermath of the invasion, the Bush administration, with the media and the Democratic Party trailing behind, sought to identify all armed opposition to the US occupiers with Zarqawi, in an effort to discredit as terrorists the Iraqis who were fighting to rid themselves of foreign invaders.
At the same time, actions attributed to Zarqawi at key points gave a boost to US interests. In February of 2004, amid signs that the Shiite population was on the verge of joining the armed resistance being fought mainly in Sunni areas, a public letter, allegedly authored by Zarqawi, called for Sunnis to provoke a civil war with the Shiites. Several weeks later, suicide bombings at Shiite mosques in Karbala and Baghdad were blamed on what the US called the "Zarqawi network."
In May of 2004, shortly after the publication of gruesome photos of torture at Abu Ghraib, American businessman Nicholas Berg was kidnapped in Iraq and, according to the US, personally decapitated by Zarqawi. Berg had been held and questioned by the US military for 13 days before he was released and, shortly thereafter, kidnapped by those who subsequently killed him. The murky circumstances of this crime, and the role of American authorities, have never been explained.
When such atrocities failed either to stem the Iraqi resistance or halt the growth of antiwar sentiment within the US, and Washington grew desperate to install a government in Baghdad with some semblance of authority and stability, Zarqawi's actions came increasingly to be seen as an obstacle to American requirements.
The Bush administration knows full well that Zarqawi never exercised the influence which it attributed to him. This is one reason for the cautionary remarks from Bush and other administration spokesmen about the impact of his elimination on the dire situation facing the US in Iraq.
The American web site Stratfor, which supports the US occupation and has close ties to elements within the US military and intelligence establishment, said in an article posted Thursday: "[M]ost estimates place the number of foreign jihadists operating in Iraq at between 800 and 1,000 at any given time--a mere fraction of the overall insurgency, which is estimated to be 15,000 to 20,000 strong."
The article went on to note that Zarqawi's organization had increasingly come into conflict with Iraqi nationalist groups within the resistance.
In one of the few discordant comments in a day-long barrage of media euphoria, reporter and author Nir Rosen put it this way in an interview on CNN: "The myth of Zarqawi was an American creation." He went on to explain that the US had deliberately exaggerated Zarqawi's role in order to discredit the Iraqi insurgency, and concluded that his absence would not improve the US position in Iraq.
There was another critical comment, remarkable for its bluntness and principled content. Michael Berg, whose son Nicholas allegedly died at Zarqawi's hands, left the CNN anchor speechless when asked for his reaction to the news of the terrorist's death. "There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before Bush invaded," he said. "I am not saying Saddam Hussein is a good man, but under him 30,000 Iraqis were dying every year, now 60,000 are dying.... Why is Iraq better off with Bush as king than with Saddam Hussein?"
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
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4. BUSH AND RASMUSSEN CONDUCT MORE THAN 'BICYCLE DIPLOMACY'
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WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
"From Deep Inside the Washington Beltway"
June 11, 2006
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com
By Wayne Madsen
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Last Friday, George W. Bush and Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen conducted what has been termed "bicycle diplomacy" at the Camp David presidential retreat. They both rode around on mountain bikes. At the same time the two Iraqi war coalition partners were bicycling around Camp David, three inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison hanged themselves. Although Rasmussen has publicly called for Guantanamo's closure, he has allowed his country to be used as a secret base for one of the CIA rendition flights that has transported prisoners to the Cuban base and have also reportedly been used to transport drugs from the Caribbean throughout the world.
According to European sources who were instrumental in assisting the Council of Europe in its investigation of CIA rendition flights and secret prisons in Eastern Europe, the CIA's Learjet 35A, owned by Aircraft Guaranty Corporation, a brass plate located at 515 N. Sam Houston Parkway East, Suite 305, Houston, Texas, and flying with tail number N35NK, has used Billund, Denmark as a base of operations. Until June 2004, the plane was owned by Wally Hilliard's Plane 1 Leasing Co. of Naples, Florida. Plane 1 Leasing is owned by Wally Hilliard, the business partner of Rudi Dekkers, whose Venice, Florida-based Huffmann Aviation flight school helped train Mohammed Atta to prepare for the 9-11 attack. N35NK made a flight to Guantanamo in April 2004.
N35NK has also been leased to Nordic Aviation Contractor at St. Petersburg-Clearwater airport in Florida. The home headquarters of Nordic Aviation in Billund, Denmark. In 2005, N35NK was re-leased to JetSmart of Connecticut and is now on sale for $2,395,000.
N35NK is not the only CIA rendition plane that intersects with drug flights, according to European intelligence sources. Many of the Learjets associated with CIA renditions came from the World Jet, Inc. fleet of the notorious Whittington brothers of Fort Lauderdale, who were later indicted for their 1980s narcotics smuggling. One of their clients was notorious CIA drug smuggler Barry Seal who was later assassinated to keep him silent. Four Learjets have been identified by European sources and FAA data as CIA rendition planes: N252WJ, N500ND, N200LJ, and N229WJ. Some of them, and Turks Air's N381AA, have made stops in Guantanamo. The current and former World Jet planes that have stopped in Guantanamo are: N229WJ, N500ND, and N252WJ.
The following is a list of the planes and their parent companies/agencies that have stopped at Guantanamo: AFIB Editor's Note: See WMR, waynemadsenreport.com, for complete listing.
Copyright 2006 Wayne Madsen Report. All rights reserved.
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5. PENTAGON SETS ITS SIGHTS ON SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITES
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NEW SCIENTIST
Top Stories
09 June 2006
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025556.200?DCMP=NLC-nletternsref=mg19025556.200
Paul Marks
"I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves." So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.
New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.
Americans are still reeling from last month's revelations that the NSA has been logging phone calls since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. The Congressional Research Service, which advises the US legislature, says phone companies that surrendered call records may have acted illegally. However, the White House insists that the terrorist threat makes existing wire-tapping legislation out of date and is urging Congress not to investigate the NSA's action.
Meanwhile, the NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have limited scope. They can only be used to build a very basic picture of someone's contact network, a process sometimes called "connecting the dots". Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or "degrees" separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.
By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking flying lessons. Typically, online social networking sites ask members to enter details of their immediate and extended circles of friends, whose blogs they might follow. People often list other facets of their personality including political, sexual, entertainment, media and sporting preferences too. Some go much further, and a few have lost their jobs by publicly describing drinking and drug-taking exploits. Young people have even been barred from the orthodox religious colleges that they are enrolled in for revealing online that they are gay.
"You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resume. People don't realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days," says Callas.
Other data the NSA could combine with social networking details includes information on purchases, where we go (available from cellphone records, which cite the base station a call came from) and what major financial transactions we make, such as buying a house.
Right now this is difficult to do because today's web is stuffed with data in incompatible formats. Enter the semantic web, which aims to iron out these incompatibilities over the next few years via a common data structure called the Resource Description Framework (RDF). W3C hopes that one day every website will use RDF to give each type of data a unique, predefined, unambiguous tag.
"RDF turns the web into a kind of universal spreadsheet that is readable by computers as well as people," says David de Roure at the University of Southampton in the UK, who is an adviser to W3C. "It means that you will be able to ask a website questions you couldn't ask before, or perform calculations on the data it contains." In a health record, for instance, a heart attack will have the same semantic tag as its more technical description, a myocardial infarction. Previously, they would have looked like separate medical conditions. Each piece of numerical data, such as the rate of inflation or the number of people killed on the roads, will also get a tag.
The advantages for scientists, for instance, could be huge: they will have unprecedented access to each other's experimental datasets and will be able to perform their own analyses on them. Searching for products such as holidays will become easier as price and availability dates will have smart tags, allowing powerful searches across hundreds of sites.
On the downside, this ease of use will also make prying into people's lives a breeze. No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA, but its interest in the technology is evident in a funding footnote to a research paper delivered at the W3C's WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, UK, in late May.
That paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team led by Amit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA.
What is ARDA? It stands for Advanced Research Development Activity. According to a report entitled Data Mining and Homeland Security, published by the Congressional Research Service in January, ARDA's role is to spend NSA money on research that can "solve some of the most critical problems facing the US intelligence community". Chief among ARDA's aims is to make sense of the massive amounts of data the NSA collects - some of its sources grow by around 4 million gigabytes a month.
The ever-growing online social networks are part of the flood of internet information that could be mined: some of the top sites like MySpace now have more than 80 million members.
The research ARDA funded was designed to see if the semantic web could be easily used to connect people. The research team chose to address a subject close to their academic hearts: detecting conflicts of interest in scientific peer review. Friends cannot peer review each other's research papers, nor can people who have previously co-authored work together.
So the team developed software that combined data from the RDF tags of online social network Friend of a Friend (www.foaf-project.org), where people simply outline who is in their circle of friends, and a semantically tagged commercial bibliographic database called DBLP, which lists the authors of computer science papers.
Joshi says their system found conflicts between potential reviewers and authors pitching papers for an internet conference. "It certainly made relationship finding between people much easier," Joshi says. "It picked up softer [non-obvious] conflicts we would not have seen before."
The technology will work in exactly the same way for intelligence and national security agencies and for financial dealings, such as detecting insider trading, the authors say. Linking "who knows who" with purchasing or bank records could highlight groups of terrorists, money launderers or blacklisted groups, says Sheth.
The NSA recently changed ARDA's name to the Disruptive Technology Office. The DTO's interest in online social network analysis echoes the Pentagon's controversial post 9/11 Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative. That programme, designed to collect, track and analyse online data trails, was suspended after a public furore over privacy in 2002. But elements of the TIA were incorporated into the Pentagon's classified programme in the September 2003 Defense Appropriations Act.
Privacy groups worry that "automated intelligence profiling" could sully people's reputations or even lead to miscarriages of justice - especially since the data from social networking sites may often be inaccurate, untrue or incomplete, De Roure warns.
But Tim Finin, a colleague of Joshi's, thinks the spread of such technology is unstoppable. "Information is getting easier to merge, fuse and draw inferences from. There is money to be made and control to be gained in doing so. And I don't see much that will stop it," he says.
Callas thinks people have to wise up to how much information about themselves they should divulge on public websites. It may sound obvious, he says, but being discreet is a big part of maintaining privacy. Time, perhaps, to hit the delete button.
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information Ltd.
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THE MOSCOW TIMES
Global Eye
June 9, 2006
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/168539/
By Chris Floyd
The last few weeks have seen disastrous news breaking over President George W. Bush's administration like another Hurricane Katrina. This time, though, it's not winds and surging seas but waves of innocent blood overtopping the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates to turn the White House crimson. Report after report of horrific atrocities -- long held back by a levee of lies, fear, obfuscation and the natural confusion of war -- has broken through, flooding the imperial capital with the reeking, corpse-filled backwash of the vast criminal folly committed by its grubby little Caesar.
So great is the stench of moral corruption that even America's corporate media, for so long a simpering handmaiden to the ruling thugs, have been forced to take notice, just as they did, all too briefly, during the Bushist abandonment of New Orleans. New sites of shame have entered the American lexicon: Haditha, Ishaqi, Hamandiya, Samarra -- places where horrors large and small, confirmed and alleged, comprehensible and unfathomable, have marked this beginning of the fourth year of occupation.
Indeed, as the tormented land flails in agony -- racked by civil war, unbounded corruption, religious repression, infrastructure collapse, the violent subjugation of women and all the other evils introduced by Bush's war of aggression -- U.S. forces seem to be gripped by an increasing frenzy of their own. In just the last three months, a string of incidents has seen Iraqi civilians gunned down by U.S. soldiers in outbursts of fury and panic, as Scotland's Sunday Herald reports. The innocent victims include unarmed women (one of them a pregnant woman trying to reach a hospital), infants, children, the elderly and the mentally handicapped. There will be more such killings brought to light as Iraqis, incensed by the Haditha massacre and emboldened by the new government's apparent willingness to confront their colonial overseers, come forth with new allegations.
As long as the occupation goes on, the discipline of U.S. forces will continue to fray under the literally dehumanizing conditions that Bush's war has established in Iraq. For example, the Marines in the Haditha massacre, many on their second or third combat tour, had already descended into a "feral state," the Sunday Herald reports: abandoning regulation billets and living, unwashed and isolated, in "primitive huts bearing skull-and-crossbones signs." A wife of one of the Haditha soldiers told Newsweek that the degraded unit was rife with "drugs, alcohol, hazing, you name it."
As the BBC reported -- back in March, to resounding silence on American shores -- Haditha "was not an isolated incident," according to several U.S. veterans of the war. Specialist Michael Blake said it was common practice to "shoot up the landscape or anything that moved" after an explosion. Sniper Jody Casey said he was told to carry a shovel with him at all times, so he could drop it next to any civilian his unit mowed down and then claim the victim was planting a bomb. "[Bombs] go off and you just zap any farmer that is close to you," he said.
None of this surprising. As we noted last week, polls show that U.S. forces in Iraq have been inculcated with the false and hate-fomenting idea that their real mission is payback for Sept. 11. With revenge as their prism for viewing the Iraqi people and facing an ever-more violent and multi-sided resistance, atrocities -- deliberate, spontaneous or accidental -- are guaranteed.
Even in the most justified conflicts, war spawns monstrosities, drawing out the beast that lurks in the muddy sediment of our brains; how much greater, then, is the guilt of those who knowingly instigate unjustified wars? How much greater is the guilt of elitist cowards who send troops -- deceived, undersupplied, undertrained, overworked -- into the death-dealing chaos of urban warfare, in a land whose people can see they are not being liberated but plundered, murdered, tortured, terrorized and driven back into a primitive, indeed, a feral state of existence?
Of course, individual soldiers retain their moral agency and the responsibility for their actions even in wartime. (Although it's true that refusing immoral orders poses risks; several coalition veterans have already been jailed by the Bush regime and the British government for resisting any further complicity with their leaders' war crime in Iraq.) The triggermen of atrocity should face justice -- and no doubt some of the low-hanging fruit will be plucked for heavily hyped trials to demonstrate American "accountability."
But "everybody knows the dice are loaded," as Leonard Cohen sings. "Everybody knows that the captain lied." Everybody knows there will be no accountability for those who authored this desecration: Bush and his dithering outrider, Tony Blair, two murderous mountebanks dripping with self-anointed piety. Bush will retire with his millions to putter about on his fake ranch, while Blair, robed in ermine, will ascend to the House of Lords -- and no doubt to a plum post with the Carlyle Group or some other fine purveyor of backroom grease. So it will be with the other perpetrators, like Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz: nothing but riches, honors, security and respect, until death drags them howling to the pit where they've sent so many countless thousands.
So yes, the Bush administration has been swamped with bad news, further exposing the dark heart of its malevolent enterprise. But everybody knows that nothing will change, just as nothing changed after Katrina. The Iraqi dead mean nothing to them. Their own soldiers mean nothing. No outrage, no scandal, no devastation will divert them from their drive for loot and dominion.
Copyright 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
*****
Since Mumia's Column, "Before Guantanamo, or Abu Ghraib, Was the Black Panthers," appeared in AFIB No. 728, June 7, 2006, Claude at the Freedom Archives, informs us:
"There are inaccuracies in the Mumia Commentary that are worth being aware of. Prison Radio is aware of them now also. Incorrect information was sent to Mumia, he has also now corrected his radio version.
"Those tortured in New Orleans in 1973 were John Bowman, Harold Taylor and Rubin Scott (Not Hank Jones and Ray Boudreaux -- neither were arrested in New Orleans although they and Richard Brown did resist the Grand Jury in San Francisco)."
Unsolicited plug: for a gold mine of information on political prisoners and their struggle for freedom, check out the Freedom Archives at: http://www.freedomarchives.org.
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News * Analysis * Research * Action
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- AFIB No. 728, June 7, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
Current U.S. military preparations for suppressing domestic civil disturbance, including the training of National Guard troops and police, are part of a long history of American "internal security" measures dating back to the first American Revolution. Generally, these measures have sought to thwart the aims of social justice movements, embodying the concept that within the civilian body politic lurks an enemy that one day the military might have to fight, or at least be ordered to fight. ... Equipped with flexible "military operations in urban terrain" and "operations other than war" doctrine, lethal and "less-than-lethal" high-tech weaponry, U.S. "armed forces" and "elite" militarized police units are being trained to eradicate "disorder," "disturbance" and "civil disobedience" in America. -- Frank Morales, "U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning: The War at Home," in Police State America, ed. Tom Burghardt [Montreal, Toronto: Arm The Spirit/Solidarity, 2002] p. 59.
Contents: Number 728
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 730/June 14, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 729/June 11, 2006
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- Tuesday, 6 June 2006 -
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1. U.S. MILITARY MOVES TO CONDONE
'HUMILIATING AND DEGRADING' TREATMENT OF PRISONERS
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/army-j06.shtml
By Joe Kay
The US military is preparing a new version of the Army Field Manual that will eliminate language prohibiting "humiliating and degrading treatment" of prisoners held in US custody, according to a report published Monday by the Los Angeles Times. The new manual would be a further step in the repudiation of international law and the codification of torture as a component of US interrogation policy.
Summarizing the essence of the discussions, the Times quotes an individual described as being familiar with the debates in the Pentagon as saying: "The overall thinking is that they need the flexibility to apply cruel techniques if military necessity requires it."
By altering the language of the Field Manual, which is the standard of conduct for all US soldiers on the ground, the Pentagon is sending a signal to the military as a whole: prisoner abuse will continue to be tolerated and encouraged.
The new version of the Army's manual on interrogation was due out earlier this year but has been delayed amidst disputes within the political establishment over how to formulate interrogation policy. One of the issues in this dispute, according to the Times, centers on language in the manual that repeats standards included in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
Common Article 3 prohibits "at any time and in any place whatsoever...violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture, [and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment." This passage was intended as a basic standard for the humane treatment of all prisoners, whether or not they were officially classified as POWs, who under the Geneva Conventions are accorded more extensive rights.
The Times does not state explicitly how the Pentagon is seeking to modify the language--whether the entire passage from Common Article 3 will be eliminated or only the final clause. Regardless, the effect of the change will be to condone a number of techniques that, in fact, amount to torture.
According to the Times, "The military has long applied Article 3 to conflicts--including civil wars--using it as a minimum standard of conduct, even during peacekeeping operations.... But top Pentagon officials now believe Common Article 3 creates an 'unintentional sanctuary' that allows Al Qaeda members to keep information from interrogators."
The new language would be only the latest in a series of moves by the Bush administration to undercut international law and legitimize torture as an instrument of US policy, using the "war on terrorism" as a pretext.
Shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush administration declared that prisoners captured during the conflict (including those the US government decided to identify as either Taliban or Al Qaeda) would not be given POW status under the Geneva Conventions. At the sa